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EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 


BY 

HENRY  SEIDEL  CANBY 

Author  of  "College  Sons  and  College  Fathers,' 

"Our  House,"  "Education  by 

Violence,"  etc. 


NEW  YORK 

THE  CENTURY  CO. 

1920 


Copyright,  1919,  1920,  by 
THE  CENTUBY  Co. 


PREFACE 

This  is  emphatically  not  a  war  book ;  and  yet 
the  chapters  that  follow,  in  one  sense,  are  the 
fruits  of  the  war,  inasmuch  as  they  represent 
reflections  upon  his  own  people  by  one  return 
ing  to  a  familiar  environment  after  active  con 
tact  with  English,  Scottish,  Irish,  and  French 
in  the  turbulent,  intimate  days  of  1918.  They 
are  complementary,  in  a  way,  to  a  volume  of 
essays  which  sprang  from  that  experience  and 
was  published  in  1919  under  the  title  "Edu 
cation  by  Violence."  But  though  representing 
in  its  inception  the  fresher  view  of  familiar 
America  of  one  returning  from  abroad,  this 
book  in  its  completed  form  is  tendered  as  a 
modest  attempt  to  depict  an  American  type 
that  was  sharpened  perhaps,  but  certainly  not 
created  by  the  war.  The  "old  Americans" 
came  to  racial  consciousness  many  years  ago, 

v 


PREFACE 

although  their  sense  of  nationality  has  been  im 
measurably  strengthened  by  the  events  of  the 
last  few  years.  It  is  no  picture  of  all  America, 
no  survey  of  our  complete  social  being  that  I 
attempt  in  the  following  pages;  but  rather  a 
highly  personal  study  of  the  typical,  the  every 
day  American  mind,  as  it  is  manifested  in  the 
American  of  the  old  stock.  It  is  a  study  of 
what  that  typical  American  product,  the  col 
lege  and  high  school  graduate,  has  become  in 
the  generation  which  must  carry  on  after  the 
war. 

New  Haven,  Connecticut, 
June  4,  1920. 


VI 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

I     THE  AMERICAN  MIND 3 

II     CONSERVATIVE  AMERICA       ....  29 

III  RADICAL  AMERICA 61 

IV  AMERICAN  IDEALISM 91 

V     RELIGION  IN  AMERICA 120 

VI     LITERATURE  IN  AMERICA     ....  149 
VII    THE  BOURGEOIS  AMERICAN.     .     .     .175 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 


IJMfV.  or 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

CHAPTER  I 

THE   AMERICAN    MIND 

IN  England  there  developed  long  ago,  per 
haps  as  far  back  as  the  days  of  Shake 
speare,  who  was  aristocratic  in  his  tastes  and 
democratic  in  his  sympathies,  a  curious  political 
animal  called  the  radical-conservative.  The 
radical-conservative,  as  Lord  Fitzmaurice  once 
said,  is  a  man  who  would  have  been  a  radical 
outright  if  radicals  had  not  been  dissenters ;  by 
which  he  clearly  meant  that  the  species  agreed 
with  radical  principles,  but  objected  to  radicals 
because  they  did  not  have  good  manners,  sel 
dom  played  cricket,  and  never  belonged  to  the 
best  clubs.  Therefore  the  radical-conserva 
tive  stays  in  his  own  more  congenial  class  while 

3 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

working  for  social  justice  toward  all  other 
classes.  He  is  willing  to  vote  with  the  con 
servative  party  in  return  for  concessions  in 
labor  laws,  inheritance  taxes,  or  the  safeguard 
ing  of  public  health. 

Thence  arises  the  curious  circumstance,  most 
mystifying  to  foreigners,  that  a  good  share  of 
the  really  progressive  legislation  in  Great  Bri 
tain  of  the  last  half-century  has  been  led  by 
young  gentlemen  from  Oxford  and  Cam 
bridge  who  have  no  more  intention  of  becom 
ing  part  of  the  proletariate  than  of  leaving  off 
their  collars  and  going  without  baths.  Bis 
marck  was  an  out-and-out  conservative  who 
for  his  own  nefarious  ends  furthered  what  a 
Rhode  Island  Republican  or  an  Ulster  Tory 
would  call  radical  measures.  But  Lord  Rob 
ert  Cecil  in  our  own  day  is  a  convinced  aris 
tocrat,  as  befits  a  son  of  Lord  Salisbury,  who 
is  more  sincerely  effective  than  many  Liberals 
in  various  movements  which  we  are  accus 
tomed  to  call  reform. 

4 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

The  conservative-liberal  is  quite  a  different 
animal  and  far  commoner,  far  more  familiar  to 
Americans,  even  if  they  have  never  called  him 
by  that  name.  His  habitat  is  America,  and 
thanks  to  the  populousness  of  this  country,  he 
is  beginning  to  have  a  very  important  influence 
outside  of  his  habitat.  To  define  him  is  diffi 
cult,  but  for  purposes  of  rough  classification  he 
may  be  said  to  be  the  man  whose  native  liberal 
instincts  have  been  crystallized  by  a  combina 
tion  of  interesting  circumstances — and  some 
times  petrified.  He  is  the  man  who  was  born 
a  liberal  in  a  liberal  country  and  intends  to 
remain  as  he  was  born.  He  is  the  man  who 
will  fight  for  the  freedom  proclaimed  by  the 
Declaration  of  Independence  against  any  later 
manifestation  of  the  revolutionary  spirit.  He 
believes  in  conserving  in  unaltered  purity  the 
principles  of  life,  government,  and  industry 
that  his  forefathers  rightly  believed  to  be  lib 
eral.  In  brief,  he  is  a  revolutionary  turned 
policeman,  a  progressive  who  stands  pat  upon 

5 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

his  progress,  a  conservative-liberal.  I  believe 
that  he  is  our  closest  approximation  to  a  typi 
cal  American  mind. 

Whether  familiar  or  not,  the  effects  of  this 
political  disease — for  it  is  a  disease,  a  harden 
ing  of  the  arteries  of  the  mind — are  easily  ob 
servable  all  about  us  in  the  America  of  to-day. 
Indeed,  we  see  them  so  frequently  that  they 
awaken  no  surprise,  are  scarcely  seen  at  all  in 
any  intellectual  sense  of  the  word.  They  are 
like  our  clear  atmosphere,  our  mixture  of  races, 
our  hurried  steps — things  we  scarcely  notice 
until  an  outsider  speaks  of  them.  I  am  not  an 
outsider.  I  am  so  much  a  part  of  America 
that  I  find  it  difficult  to  detach  myself  from  a 
mood  that  is  mine  in  common  with  many  other 
Americans.  And  yet,  once  one  sees  it  plainly, 
the  educated  conservatism  of  liberal  America 
becomes  portentous,  a  unique  political  pheno 
menon. 

I  think  that  this  peculiarity  of  our  political 
thinking  first  became  evident  to  me  on  an  ocean 

6 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

voyage  in  war-time.  There  were  a  score  or  so 
of  Americans  on  board,  members,  most  of 
them,  of  various  government  missions,  picked 
business  men,  picked  professional  men,  thor 
oughly  intelligent,  intensely  practical,  and  en 
tirely  American.  They  were  democratic,  too, 
as  we  use  the  word  in  America;  that  is,  good 
"mixers,"  free  from  snobbery,  and  nothing  new 
in  action  was  alien  to  their  sympathies.  They 
could  remold  you  a  business  or  a  legal  prac 
tice  in  half  an  hour's  conversation;  tear  down 
an  organization  and  build  it  up  again  between 
cigars.  Their  committee  meetings  went  off 
like  machine-guns,  whereas  the  English  offi 
cers  and  trade  diplomats,  when  they  got  to 
gether,  snarled  themselves  in  set  speeches  and 
motions  and  took  an  afternoon  to  get  anywhere. 
The  English,  indeed,  seemed  puzzled  and  a 
little  dazed  by  the  ease  with  which  the  Ameri 
cans  seized  upon  ami  put  through  reorganiza 
tion  of  any  kind.  They  seemed  positively  to 
leap  at  change,  so  long  as  basic  ideas  were  not 

7 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

involved.  "Nothing,"  said  an  Indian  colonel, 
"is  sacred  to  them.  They  would  scrap  the  em 
pire  and  build  a  new  one — on  paper — at  sixty 
miles  an  hour." 

He  was  quite  wrong.  The  system  my  coun 
trymen  lived  by  permitted  change,  urged 
change,  up  to  a  certain  point.  They  would 
demolish  a  ten-story  building  to  erect  one  of 
twenty  or  scrap  thousands  of  machines  in  order 
to  adopt  a  better  process,  but  when  it  came  to 
principles  and  institutions  they  were  conserva 
tive.  The  founders  of  their  social  and  politi 
cal  order  had  been  almost  a  century  ahead  of 
the  times.  The  instruments  of  life  and  of 
government  they  had  provided  had  served  with 
slight  modifications  for  the  free-moving 
America  of  the  nineteenth  century.  It  had 
been  a  game  for  Americans,  and  a  splendid  one, 
to  realize  the  liberality  and  democracy  possible 
under  the  Constitution,  to  work  out  the  inde 
pendence  available  for  the  common  man  in  a 
rich  and  undeveloped  country  in  which  his 

8 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

political  power  guaranteed  him  every  advan 
tage  that  could  be  gained  in  a  capitalistic  sys 
tem,  including  the  acquisition  of  capital.  It 
had  been  a  splendid  game,  and  our  wits  had 
been  sharpened,  our  faculties  strengthened, 
our  prosperity  fortified,  our  self-confidence 
enormously  increased  in  playing  it.  Given  our 
rules,  we  could  play  the  game  more  resource 
fully  than  any  other  people  on  earth.  And 
they  were  wise  rules,  which  provided  for 
growth,  but  not  for  a  different  kind  of  contest. 
We  were  so  sure  that  America  stood  for  free 
dom,  independence,  and  liberality  in  general 
that  we  could  not  take  seriously  people  who 
did  not  believe  in  democracy,  nor  conceive  that 
there  might  be  an  idea  of  democracy  different 
from  our  own. 

Indeed,  on  board  that  ship,  a  curious  ex 
perience  came  to  all  of  us,  Englishmen,  Ameri 
cans,  and  I,  the  humble  observer,  when  in  the 
course  of  argument  or  conference  the  theories 
of  life  upon  which  we  were  variously  living 

9 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

came  momentarily  into  view.  The  Ameri 
cans,  it  was  clear,  were  certain  that  they  were 
the  most  progressive  people  in  the  world.  This 
certainty  was  like  the  fixed  dogma  of  a  Roman 
Catholic;  it  gave  them  elasticity  and  daring. 
Being  sure  of  their  principles,  so  sure  as  to  be 
almost  unaware  of  them,  they  ignored  prece 
dents,  and  solved  or  dismissed  problems  with 
equal  ease.  They  made  plans  for  a  league  of 
nations,  they  approved  of  a  temporary  au 
tocracy  for  the  President,  they  put  the  labor 
question  on  a  business  basis,  and  so  disposed 
of  it ;  they  were  afraid  of  nothing  but  a  failure 
to  act  and  act  quickly.  Nevertheless,  as  they 
talked  and  worked  with  the  English,  it  became 
increasingly  evident  that  their  road  ended  in 
a  wall. 

There  were  walls  on  the  English  road,  too — 
walls  of  caste  thinking  and  social  privilege  chat 
seemed  as  ridiculous  as  a  moat  around  an  of 
fice  building.  Our  wall  was  invisible  to  most 
of  us,  and  as  a  body  we  never  tried  to  pass  it 

10 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

at  all.  It  was  the  end  wall  of  our  liberal  ideas, 
beyond  which,  if  we  thought  of  it  at  all,  pre 
sumably  lay  socialism,  anarchy,  chaos. 

Just  that  far  the  American  mind,  like  some 
light  tank,  ran,  surmounting  everything,  taking 
to  the  fields  if  the  road  was  blocked,  turning, 
backing,  doing  everything  but  stop;  only  to 
halt  dead  at  the  invisible  barrier,  and  zigzag 
away  again.  By  such  a  free-moving  process 
within  the  limits  of  law  we  had  scrambled 
across  a  continent  in  turbulent,  individualistic 
exploitation,  and  yet  had  built  a  sound  politi 
cal  system  carefully  and  well.  And  there  we 
had  stopped,  convinced  that  we  had  solved  the 
problem  of  democracy  and  equal  opportunity 
for  all.  This  explains  why  America  is  twenty 
years  behind  the  best  of  Europe  in  social  and 
economic  reform.  (To  be  sure,  Europe  needed 
reform  more  than  we  did).  This  is  what  it  is 
to  be  a  conservative-liberal. 

The  Englishman  is  different.  He  is  much 
more  likely  to  be  an  obstinate  Tory,  blocking 

ii 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

all  advance,  and  living,  as  far  as  he  is  able,  by  a 
system  as  antiquated  as  feudalism;  or  if  not  a 
Tory,  then  an  out-and-out  radical  eager  for  a 
legal  revolution.  But  in  either  case  he  knows 
what  different-minded  men  are  thinking;  and  if 
there  is  a  wall  on  his  road,  he  looks  over  it.  If 
he  is  a  Tory,  he  understands  radicalism  and 
fights  it  because  he  prefers  an  inequality  that 
favors  him  to  a  more  logical  system  that  might 
be  personally  disagreeable.  If  he  is  a  radical, 
he  understands  Toryism.  But  the  American 
conservative-liberal  acknowledges  no  opinion 
except  his  own.  He  insists,  in  the  words 
of  a  contemporary  statesman,  that  the 
American  system,  as  founded  by  our  fore 
fathers,  is  the  best  in  the  world,  and  he  is  not 
interested  in  others.  There  are  a  thousand 
proofs  that  it  is  not  the  best  possible  system 
even  for  America,  and  plenty  of  them  are  in 
print — proofs  advanced  by  capitalists  as  well 
as  labor  leaders,  by  Catholics  as  well  as  social 
ists;  but  they  do  not  trouble  him,  because  he 

12 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

neither  hears  nor  reads  them.  It  is  easier  to 
call  the  writer  a  crank  or  a  Bolshevik. 

This  is  the  liberal-conservative  mind  that 
will  not  look  beyond  its  own  fixed  principles  and 
refuses  to  understand  those  who  differ  from 
it;  that  suffers  a  kind  of  paralysis  when  con 
fronted  by  genuine  radicalism.  The  Ameri 
can  college  undergraduate  has  it  to  perfection. 
Bubbling  over  with  energy,  ready  for  anything 
in  the  practical  world  of  struggle  or  adventure, 
'he  is  as  confident  and  as  careful  of  the  ideas  he 
has  inherited  as  a  girl  of  her  reputation.  He 
is  armored  against  new  thinking.  The  Ameri 
can  business  man  fairly  professes  it.  He 
speculates  in  material  things  with  a»n  abandon 
that  makes  a  Frenchman  pale;  but  new  prin 
ciples  in  the  relations  of  trade  to  general  wel 
fare,  questions  of  unearned  increment,  first 
bore  and  then,  if  pressed  home,  frighten  him. 

And  yet  the  college  undergraduates,  after 
hatching,  and  the  American  business  man  have 
made  for  us  a  very  comfortable  America,  just 

13 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

now  the  safest  place  in  the  world  to  live  in,  the 
most  prosperous  country  in  the  world,  the 
most  cheerful.  The  liberal-conservative  way 
of  doing  things  has  its  great  advantages. 
America  is  its  product,  and  the  ranter  who  de 
scribes  the  United  States  as  the  home  of  super- 
capitalism,  a  sink  of  cheaply  exploited  labor,  a 
dull  stretch  of  bourgeois  mediocrity,  does  not 
seem  to  be  able  to  persuade  even  himself  that 
the  United  States  is  not  the  best  of  all  coun 
tries  for  a  permanent  residence. 

And  the  great  Americans  of  the  past  have 
nearly  all  been  conservative-liberals.  Wash 
ington  was  a  great  republican ;  he  was  also  es 
sentially  an  aristocrat  in  social  and  economic 
relations,  who  kept  slaves  and  did  not  believe 
in  universal  suffrage.  Lincoln,  politically,  was 
the  greatest  of  English-speaking  democrats, 
but  he  let  the  privileged  classes  exploit  the 
working-man  and  the  soldier,  partly  in  order  to 
win  the  war,  chiefly  because  problems  of  wages 
and  unearned  increments  and  economic  priv- 

14 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

ilege  generally  did  not  enter  into  his  scheme  of 
democracy.  Roosevelt  fought  a  good  fight  for 
the  square  deal  in  public  and  private  life,  but 
hesitated  and  at  last  turned  back  when  it  be 
came  evident  that  a  deal  that  was  completely 
square  meant  the  overturning  of  social  life  as 
he  knew  and  loved  it  in  America. 

And  these  men  we  feel  were  right.  Their 
duty  was  to  make  possible  a  good  government 
and  a  stable  society,  and  they  worked  not  with 
theories  only,  but  also  with  facts  as  they  were. 
The  Germans  have  argued  that  the  first  duty 
of  the  state  is  self-preservation,  and  that  rights 
of  individual  men  and  other  states  may  properly 
be  crushed  in  order  to  preserve  it.  We  have 
crushed  the  Germans  and,  one  hopes,  their  phil 
osophy.  But  no  one  doubts  that  it  is  a  duty  of 
society  to  preserve  itself.  No  one  believes  that 
universal  suffrage  for  all,  negroes  included, 
would  have  been  advisable  in  Washington's 
day,  when  republicanism  was  still  an  experi 
ment.  No  one  believes,  I  fancy,  that  the  mini- 

15 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

mum  wage,  the  inheritance  tax,  and  coopera 
tive  management  should  have  had  first  place,  or 
indeed  any  place,  in  the  mind  of  the  Lincoln  of 
1863.  Few  suppose  that  Roosevelt  as  a  social 
ist  would  have  been  as  useful  to  the  United 
States  as  Roosevelt  the  Progressive  with  a 
back-throw  toward  the  ideals  of  the  aristo 
cratic  state;  as  Roosevelt  the  conservative- 
liberal. 

But  too  great  reliance  on  even  a  great  tra 
dition  has  its  disadvantages.  I  know  an 
American  preparatory  school  that  for  many 
college  generations  has  entered  its  students  at 
a  famous  university  with  the  highest  of  ex 
amination  records,  and  a  reputation  for  cour 
tesy  and  cleanness  of  mind  and  soundness  of 
body  scarcely  paralleled  elsewhere.  I  have 
watched  these  boys  with  much  interest,  and  I 
have  seen  them  in  surprising  numbers  gradually 
decline  from  their  position  of  superiority  as 
they  faced  the  rapid  changes  of  college  life,  as 
they  settled  into  a  new  environment  with  differ- 

16 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

ent  demands  and  more  complex  standards. 
They  leaned  too  heavily  upon  their  admirable 
schooling;  they  were  too  confident  of  the 
strength  and  worth  of  their  tradition;  they 
looked  backward  instead  of  forward,  and  stood 
still  while  less  favored  men  went  on.  Their 
fault  was  the  fault  of  American  liberalism, 
which  stands  pat  with  Washington  and  Roose 
velt  and  Lincoln. 

Perhaps  the  greatest  teacher  in  nineteenth- 
century  American  universities  was  William 
Graham  Sumner.  In  his  day  he  was  called  a 
radical,  and  unsuccessful  efforts  were  made  to 
oust  him  from  his  professorship  because  of  his 
advocacy  of  free  trade.  Now  I  hear  him  cited 
as  a  conservative  by  those  who  quote  his  sup 
port  of  individualism  against  socialism,  his 
distrust  of  cooperation  against  the  league  of 
nations.  His  friends  forget  that  an  honest 
radical  in  one  age  would  be  an  honest  radical 
in  another;  and  that  the  facts  available  hav 
ing  changed,  it  is  certain  that  his  opinions 

17 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

would  change  also,  although  just  what  he  would 
advocate,  just  how  decide,  we  cannot  certainly 
know.  Is  it  probable  that  Dante,  the  great  ad 
vocate  of  imperial  control  in  a  particularistic 
medieval  world,  would  have  been  a  pro-German 
in  1914?  The  American  liberal  who  proclaims 
himself  of  the  party  of  Lincoln,  and  is  content 
with  that  definition,  might  have  an  unpleasant 
shock  if  that  great  reader  of  the  heart  of  the 
common  man  could  resume  his  short-cut  life. 
Indeed,  an  inherited  liberalism  has  the  same 
disadvantages  as  inherited  money:  all  the 
owner  has  to  do  is  to  learn  how  to  keep  it;  in 
other  words,  to  become  a  conservative.  That 
is  what  is  going  on  in  America.  While  we 
were  pioneers  in  liberty  and  individualism, 
wealth  and  opportunity  and  independence  were 
showered  upon  us,  and  although  wealth  for  the 
average  man  is  harder  to  come  by,  and  oppor 
tunity  is  more  and  more  limited  to  the  for 
tunate,  and  independence  belongs  only  to  good 
incomes,  nevertheless  the  conservative-liberal 

18 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

keeps  the  pioneer's  optimism,  and  is  satisfied  to 
take  ready-made  a  system  that  his  ancestors 
wrought  by  painful  and  open-minded  experi 
ment.  In  practice  he  is  still  full  of  initiative 
and  invention;  in  principle  he  can  conceive  of 
only  one  dispensation,  the  ideas  of  political 
democracy  which  were  the  radicalism  of  1861 
and  1840  and  1789  and  1776. 

Suppose  that  he  could  conceive  of  industrial 
democracy,  of  a  system  where  every  man  be 
gan  with  an  equal  share  of  worldly  privilege 
as  he  begins  now  with  an  equal  share  of 
worldly  rights.  Would  he  not  work  it  out, 
with  his  still  keen  practicality,  and  test  its 
value  precisely  as  he  tests  a  new  factory  method 
or  an  advertising  scheme?  But  he  can 
not  conceive  of  it.  It  lies  beyond  his  dispen 
sation.  His  liberalism  turns  conservative  at 
the  thought.  It  was  different  with  political 
democracy  and  with  religious  toleration.  The 
first  cannot  even  now  be  said  to  be  precisely  a 
perfect  system,  and  the  second  has  left  us  per- 

19 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

ilously  near  to  having  no  religion  at  all.  Nev 
ertheless,  the  liberal  ancestor  of  our  American 
never  doubted  that  they  were  his  problems,  to 
be  worked  out  to  some  solution.  He  followed 
boldly  where  they  led. 

What  has  happened  to  the  political  and  eco 
nomic  thinking  of  many  an  American  much 
resembles  what  has  happened  to  his  religion. 
He  learns  at  church  a  number  of  ethical  prin 
ciples  which  would  make  him  very  uneasy  if 
put  into  practice.  He  learns  the  virtue  of 
poverty,  the  duty  of  self-sacrifice,  the  necessity 
of  love  for  his  fellow-man.  Now,  saintly 
poverty  has  not  become  an  ideal  in  America — 
certainly  not  in  New  York  or  Iowa  or  Atlantic 
City — nor  is  self-sacrifice  common  among  cor 
porations,  or  love  a  familiar  attribute  of  the 
practice  of  law.  Does  the  American  therefore 
eschew  the  ethics  of  Christianity?  On  the 
contrary.  Religion  is  accepted  at  its  tradi 
tional  value.  The  church  grows  richer  and 
more  influential — within  limits.  The  plain 

20 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

man  keeps  all  his  respects  for  religion  as  an 
ideal;  but  he  regards  it  precisely  as  an  ideal,  a 
formula  beautiful  in  its  perfection,  not  to  be 
sullied  by  too  close  an  application,  not  to  be 
worked  out  into  new  terms  to  fit  a  new  life. 

And  that  is  just  what  the  conservative-lib 
eral  does  with  the  vigorous  liberalism  of  his 
forefathers.  He  buries  it  in  his  garden,  and 
expects  to  dig  it  up  after  many  days,  a  bond 
with  coupons  attached.  He  has  accepted  it  as 
the  irrevocable  word  of  Jehovah  establishing 
the  metes  and  bounds  wherein  he  shall  think. 
It  is  his  creed;  and  like  the  creeds  of  the 
church,  the  further  one  gets  from  its  origins, 
the  greater  the  repugnance  to  change.  He 
stands  'by  the  declaration  of  his  forefathers; 
stands  pat,  and  begs  to  be  relieved  of  further 
abstract  discussion.  Business  is  pressing;  con 
troversy  is  bad  for  business ;  ideas  are  bad  for 
business;  change  is  bad  for  business:  let  well 
enough  alone. 

But  by  all  odds  the  most  important  fact  as 

21 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

regards  this  conservative-liberal  mind  of  which 
I  have  been  writing  remains  to  be  stated,  and 
that  is  its  success,  for  it  is  now  the  prevailing 
mind  in  America.  As  our  soldiers  in  France, 
though  bearing  Italian  names,  Irish  names, 
Hebrew,  Polish,  German  names,  yet  in  helmet 
and  uniform  looked  all,  or  nearly  all,  like  the 
physical  type  we  call  American,  so  in  this  con 
fusing  country  of  ours,  immigrant-settled, 
polylingual,  built  upon  fragments  of  the  em 
pires  of  England  and  Spain  and  Russia  and 
France,  there  is  indubitably  a  mental  type 
which  we  may  call  with  some  confidence  Ameri 
can,  a  mind  liberal  in  its  principles,  but  in  its 
instincts  conservative. 

Indeed  it  is  arguable  and  perhaps  demon 
strable  that  this  American  mental  type  is  the 
most  definite  national  entity  to  be  found  any 
where  in  the  Western  world.  I  know  that 
this  sounds  paradoxical.  We  have  heard 
much  for  several  years  now  of  the  lack  of 
homogeneity  in  America.  We  felt  in  1914  our 

22 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

German-Americans  cleave  away  from  us  (to 
be  sure,  they  came  back)  ;  we  saw  in  1918  and 
1919  the  radical  socialist  and  the  I.  W.  W.  and 
the  vehement  intellectual  manifest  symptoms 
that  were  certainly  not  American  as  the  'nine 
ties  knew  America.  We  began  to  realize  that 
the  immigrant  changes  his  language  more 
quickly  than  his  mores,  and  frequently  changes 
neither.  All  this  is  true.  And  yet,  in  spite  of 
it,  this  conservative-liberal  way  of  looking  at 
things  which  we  know  so  well  in  America 
comes  nearer  to  being  a  definite  national 
psychology  that  acts  in  expected  fashions,  has 
qualities  that  you  can  describe  as  I  have  been 
describing  them,  and  characteristics  common 
to  all  varieties  of  it,  than  either  the  "British 
mind"  or  the  "French  mind"  of  which  we  write 
glibly. 

For  the  British  mind  includes  the  Irish, 
which  is  as  different  from  the  English  as  a 
broncho  from  a  dray-horse.  It  includes  the 
Tory  mind  and  the  Liberal  mind,  which  in 

23 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

England  are  as  dissimilar  as  were  Jefferson 
Davis  and  Abraham  Lincoln.  It  includes,  if 
we  use  it  loosely,  Sir  Edward  Carson  and  Mr. 
Asquith  and  H.  G.  Wells,  each  of  whom  repre 
sents  a  considerable  British  constituency. 
And  they  could  no  more  think  alike  on  any 
topic  on  the  earth  below  or  the  heavens  above 
than  a  Turk,  a  Greek,  and  a  Jew.  Certain 
fundamental  attitudes  would  unite  all  three  of 
these  latter  if  they  were  civilized :  they  would 
all  eat  with  knives  and  forks.  And  in  the  same 
fashion  certain  definite  racial  traits  unite  the 
Britons  aforementioned.  But  the  differences 
imposed  by  social  caste  or  diverging  political 
and  social  philosophies  are  far  greater  than 
anything  to  be  found  in  everyday  America, 
which  latter  I  define  as  lying  between  the 
fringe  of  recent  immigrants  on  the  one  hand 
and  the  excrescences  of  Boston  intellectual 
aristocrats  or  New  York  radical  intellectuals 
on  the  other. 

Is  there  a  'Trench  mind"?     Intellectually 
24 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

and  esthetically,  perhaps  yes.  Politically  and 
socially,  to  a  less  degree  of  uniformity  than  can 
be  found  in  America.  From  the  simple  homo 
geneity  of  France,  as  we  casuals  see  it,  has 
crystallized  out  the  aristocracy  and  much  of  the 
church,  whose  respective  parties  differ  not 
merely  as  regards  the  policy  of  the  Govern 
ment,  but  are  still  opposed  to  that  Government 
itself. 

The  United  States,  far  more  heterogeneous 
in  race,  far  less  fixed  in  national  character, 
threatened  by  its  masses  of  aliens,  who  are  in 
every  sense  unabsorbed,  is  yet  much  more 
homogeneous  in  its  thinking.  In  America 
weekly  magazines  for  men  and  women  spread 
everywhere  and  through  every  class  but  the 
lowest,  and  so  does  this  conservative-liberalism 
in  politics  and  social  life  which  I  have  tried  to 
define.  In  Connecticut  and  Kansas  and  Ari 
zona  it  is  displayed  in  every  conversation,  as 
our  best  known  national  weekly  (itself  con 
servative-liberal)  is  displayed  on  every  news- 

25 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

stand.  Irrespective  of  racial  or  financial  dif 
ferences,  everywhere  in  America,  between  the 
boundaries  I  have  already  indicated — the  alien 
immigrant  on  one  hand,  the  advanced  intellect 
ual  on  the  other — nine  out  of  ten  of  us  are 
conservative-liberals ;  everywhere,  indeed, 
throughout  the  American  bourgeoisie,  which 
with  us  includes  skilled  laborer  and  farmer, 
professional  man  and  millionaire. 

And  the  mental  habits  of  this  contemporary 
American  are  of  more  than  local  importance. 
We  who  are  just  now  so  afraid  of  internation 
alism  are  more  likely  than  any  other  single 
agency  to  bring  it  about.  Our  habits  of  travel, 
our  traverse  of  class  lines,  our  American  way 
of  doing  things,  are  perhaps  the  nearest  ap 
proximation  of  what  the  world  seems  likely  to 
adopt  as  a  modern  habit  if  the  old  aristocracies 
break  down  everywhere,  if  easy  transportation 
becomes  general,  if  there  is  widespread  educa 
tion,  if  Bolshevism  does  not  first  turn  our 
whole  Western  system  upside  down.  Already 

26 


THE  AMERICAN  MIND 

in  newspapers  and  books,  in  theaters  and  poli 
tics,  in  social  intercourse  and  in  forms  of  music 
and  language,  one  sees  all  through  Western 
Europe  (and,  they  say,  also  in  the  East)  the 
American  mode  creeping  in,  to  be  welcomed  or 
cursed  according  to  circumstances.  And  those 
great  international  levelers,  the  movies,  are 
American  in  plot  and  scene  and  idea  and  man 
ners  from  one  end  to  the  other  of  a  film  that 
stretches  round  the  world. 

Thus  the  American  mind  is  worth  troubling 
about;  and  if  politically,  socially,  economically 
the  spirit  that  we  and  the  foreigners  call  Amer 
ican  has  become  stagnant  in  its  liberalism,  it  is 
time  to  awake.  In  liberalism  inheres  our  vital 
ity,  our  initiative,  our  strength.  Its  stagna 
tion,  its  inertia,  its  blindness  to  the  new  waves 
of  freedom  sweeping  upward  from  the  masses 
and  on  in  broken  and  muddy  torrents  through 
the  world  are  poignant  dangers.  We  must 
open  eyes;  we  must  change  our  ground;  we 
must  fight  the  evil  in  the  new  revolution,  but 

27 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

welcome  the  good.  Our  own  revolution  lies 
before  the  deluge ;  it  is  no  longer  enough  to  go 
on ;  it  is  not  now  the  sufficing  document  of  a  po 
litical  philosophy.  We  must  not  stop  with 
Washington  and  Lincoln.  We  must  go  on 
where  the  conservative  Washington  and  the 
radital  Lincoln  would  lead  if  they  were 
our  contemporaries.  Radical-conservatism  is 
good,  and  Toryism  or  radicalism  have  their 
uses ;  but  conservative-liberalism,  preserved, 
desiccated,  museum  liberalism,  long  continued 
in,  is  death  to  the  minds  that  maintain  it. 


28 


CHAPTER  II 

CONSERVATIVE   AMERICA 

THERE  is  one  experience  that  conserva 
tive-liberal  America — bourgeois  Amer 
ica,  the  pushing  America  that  gets  what  it 
wants  on  this  side  of  the-  ocean — possesses  in 
common,  and  that  is  its  education.  We  of  the 
vast  American  middle  class  have  all  been  to 
high  school,  or  we  have  lived  with  high  school 
graduates;  we  have  all  been  to  college,  or  we 
have  worked  with  college  graduates.  Our 
education,  when  viewed  with  any  detachment, 
is  astoundingly  homogeneous.  In  a  given 
generation  most  of  us  have  studied  the  same 
textbooks  in  mathematics  and  geography  and 
history,  read  the  same  selections  in  literature, 
been  inoculated  with  the  same  ethical  principles 
from  the  Bible  and  the  moralists.  Ask  us  a 

29 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

question  as  to  what  makes  right  or  wrong,  as 
the  President  did  in  his  war  messages,  and  we 
will  respond  with  a  universal  roar,  like  factory 
whistles  when  a  button  is  punched  on  some  cele- 
bratio'n  day. 

This  general  American  experience  is  largely 
responsible  for  the  tenacity  with  which  we  of 
this  generation  blindly  conserve  the  liberal 
principles  of  our  ancestors,  even  while  we  keep 
them,  like  the  tables  of  the  ten  commandments, 
safe  from  the  rude  touch  of  practical  exper 
ience.  Education  such  as  ours  seldom  fails  to 
influence  men's  ways  of  thinking  even  when 
their  actions  pass  beyond  its  control.  The  in 
fluence,  however,  is  too  often  ineffectual,  blood 
less.  That  is  a  lesson  we  need  to  ponder  in 
America. 

Education  in  these  colonies  in  the  eighteenth 
century  was  bent  toward  theology.  All  but 
the  lower  schools,  if,  indeed,  they  could  be  ex- 
cepted,  were  contrived  to  find  and  to  train  the 
pastor,  the  minister  to  the  people.  For  him 

30 


CONSERVATIVE  AMERICA 

those  studies  that  influence  opinion — history, 
ethics — were  chiefly  taught.  For  his  purposes, 
the  languages  of  the  classics  were  chiefly 
studied.  It  was  the  pastor  that  emerged  as 
prime  product  of  academies  and  colleges.  And 
therefore  theology,  that  arduous  intellectual 
exercise  for  which  he  prepared,  set  its  mark  up 
on  all  intellects  down  to  the  humblest.  We 
wonder  at  the  obsession  with  religious  thinking 
that  the  letters  and  diaries  of  farmers,  mer 
chants,  and  lawyers  of  our  eighteenth  century 
display  to  the  amazement  of  their  very  untheo- 
logical  descendants.  We  should  rather  won 
der  at  the  intellectual  energy  expended  in 
wrestling  with  a  difficult  and  abstract  subject. 
They  entered,  as  we  of  the  twentieth-century 
bourgeois  do  not,  into  the  field  of  scholarship ; 
they  partook  of  disputes  that  were  as  interna 
tional  as  Christendom;  and  shared  with  the 
chosen  ones  for  whom  all  this  education  was 
made,  Jonathan  Edwards  and  his  co-profes 
sionals,  an  interest  in  problems  far  broader 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

than  their  strip  of  Atlantic  clearings.  That 
the  experience,  whatever  we  may  think  of  the 
value  of  the  theology,  was  good  for  them  does 
not,  I  think,  permit  of  argument.  There  have 
never  been  abler  Americans  than  at  the  end  of 
the  eighteenth  century. 

But  nineteenth-century  America  was  a  dif 
ferent  world.  Interest  in  theology  abated  for 
reasons  that  need  not  here  be  discussed.  More 
and  more  the  United  States  diverged  intellect 
ually  from  our  colonial  unity  with  Europe ;  our 
own  problems  engrossed  us;  and  these  were 
problems  of  material  development,  of  local 
statecraft,  of  that  elementary  education  which 
a  democracy  must  necessarily  take  as  its  chief 
concern.  What  had  been  a  professional  train 
ing  by  which  God's  ministers  were  to  be  se 
lected  became  relatively  unprofessional,  a  so- 
called  "liberal  education,"  the  object  of  which 
was  to  illumine  and  make  pliable  and  broad  the 
minds  of  laymen.  The  high  purpose  of  the 
teacher  was  not  now  to  choose  the  leaders  of 

32 


CONSERVATIVE  AMERICA 

the  spirit.  It  was  rather  to  preserve  in  a  new 
world  of  crude  physical  endeavor  the  arts  and 
sciences  that  civilize  the  mind. 

American  life  in  the  nineteenth  century  had 
many  of  the  characteristics  that  we  are  accus 
tomed  to  associate  with  heroic  barbarism.  It 
had  the  same  insecurity — insecurity  of  life  on 
the  border,  insecurity  of  fortune  where  life  was 
safe.  It  had  the  same  frequency  of  hazardous 
toil  against  wild  nature;  the  same  accompani 
ments  of  cold  and  privation ;  the  same  vast  and 
shadowy  enterprises,  usually  collapsing;  the 
same  intensity  of  physical  sensation ;  the  same 
ardor  of  emotional  experience  in  the  spiritual 
realm.  And  always  education  mitigated  ex 
travagance,  restrained  excess,  directed  effort. 
Through  education  our  ancestral  Europe  re 
strained  and  guided  us.  Education  kept  us 
white. 

But  never,  perhaps,  has  the  divergence  be 
tween  life  as  it  had  to  be  lived  and  the  civilities 
taught  us  in  school  been  greater.  Never,  has 

33 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

the  ideal  world,  which,  after  all,  it  is  the  chief 
business  of  education  to  mirror,  been  more  dif 
ferent  from  the  facts  of  experience  than  in 
America.  The  ridiculous  scientist  of  Cooper's 
"Prairie"  who  mistakes  his  donkey  for  a  new 
monster  and  thinks  it  more  important  to  call 
the  buffalo  the  bison  than  to  eat  when  hungry 
of  its  hump,  is  a  symbol  of  the  contrast  between 
what  we  learned  and  what  we  did  in  America. 
In  the  eighteenth  century,  education  for  most 
Americans  was  practical  preparation  for  a 
knowledge  of  God's  ways  with  man.  In  the 
nineteenth  it  had  become  not  a  preparation  for 
life  so  much  as  an  antiseptic  against  the  de 
moralizations  of  a  purely  material  struggle  to 
open  up  a  continent.  The  results  have  been  of 
grave  political  importance. 
,  For  the  divergence  between  theory  and  prac 
tice  explains  the  curiously  traditional  character 
of  our  schooling  as  we  knew  it  in  youth,  as  our 
grandfathers  knew  it  in  youth.  I  am  not  now 
speaking  of  the  wearisome  controversies  over 

34 


CONSERVATIVE  AMERICA 

Latin  and  Greek  and  classic  English  literature, 
the  so-called  traditional  subjects  which  make 
up  a  large  part  of  education.  It  is  not  the  let 
ter,  but  the  spirit,  that  makes  the  thing  taught 
traditional.  And  ever  since  democracy  began, 
the  teacher  has  had  to  be  the  priest  and  guard 
ian  of  tradition  in  America.  He  has  been  an 
anxious  parent  stretching  the  coverlet  of  racial 
culture  over  the  restless  limbs  of  little  immi 
grants.  He  has  taught  reading,  writing,  and 
arithmetic  as  a  means  of  holding  fast  to  our 
tradition.  He  has  taught  literature  and  his 
tory  and  "moral  ethics"  and  "natural  science" 
as  the  containers  of  that  tradition.  We  have 
almost  forgotten  that  for  a  time  in  the  early 
nineteenth  century  it  seemed  quite  possible  that 
the  frontier  would  become  Indian  rather  than 
European  in  its  culture.  We  see  clearly  now 
how  possible  it  would  have  been  for  whole 
regions  of  the  South  to  relapse  into  negro  semi- 
barbarism.  We  may  guess  that  save  for  the 
teacher  and  his  grinding  in  of  tradition  the 

35 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

white  races  of  North  America  might  have 
slipped  backward,  as  too  clearly  have  the  white 
races  in  many  parts  of  Latin  America. 

One  element  in  this  education  by  tradition 
was  specially  important.  Liberalism,  the  prin 
ciple  upon  which  this  republic  was  founded, 
education  took  up  as  soon  as  it  dropped 
theology,  if  not  earlier.  American  education 
became  impregnated  with  liberalism,  made  lib 
eralism  its  chief  tradition.  What  we  study  in 
school  and  college  stays  by  us,  overlaid  perhaps, 
scarcely  vital  any  more,  yet  packed  close  to  the 
roots  of  our  conscious  being.  And  the  com 
post  they  gave  us  in  America  was  liberalism. 
History  enshrined  the  republican  ideals  of  our 
founders  and  the  democratic  ideals  of  our  nine 
teenth-century  development.  Sometimes  it 
was  taught  in  college  classes  with  "sources" 
duly  ticketed.  Sometimes  it  trickled  through 
commencement  speeches  or  primers  thumbed 
on  back-row  benches.  The  results  were  the 
same.  In  literature,  whether  English  or 

36 


CONSERVATIVE  AMERICA 

American,  the  same  ideas  were  predominant, 
or  at  least  were  made  to  seem  so  by  careful  se 
lection.  Democracy  and  the  rights  of  man 
blow  through  the  reading  of  the  American 
school-boy,  somewhat  aridly  it  must  be  admit 
ted;  but  still  they  blow.  Civics  and  govern 
ment  and  the  social  sciences  in  these  latter 
days,  as  they  are  taught  in  America,  advance 
the  same  standard. 

Not  less  definite  and  persuasive  was  the  in 
fluence  of  the  men  who  taught  us.  Many  of 
them  have  been  aristocratic  in  taste  and  in  their 
misprision  of  the  stupidities  of  the  common 
man,  but  their  text  also  was  of  liberalism  and 
democracy  whenever  the  subject  or  the  occasion 
permitted.  Even  geography  and  spelling  were 
presented  as  the  means  whereby  the  child  of  the 
laboring  man  had  been  given  his  chance  to  rise 
in  the  world  and  perhaps  become  President. 
Properly  considered,  the  things  we  have  been 
taught,  the  men  who  taught  us,  the  very  organ 
ization  of  our  school  and  college  system,  have 

37 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

been  one  vast  engine  for  shaping  the  minds  of 
young  America  in  the  turn  and  mold  of  liberal 
ism. 

But  this  liberalism,  like  most  of  our  educa 
tion,  was  highly  traditional.  Our  subjects  and 
the  men  who  taught  them  looked  prevailingly 
backward  for  inspiration,  recalled  us  to  the 
past,  warned  us  of  the  future.  The  urge  was 
always  the  old  Roman  one — preserve  the  piety 
of  your  ancestors.  Preparation  for  new  con 
ditions,  for  a  possible  new  liberty  in  industry 
or  politics,  for  a  possible  new  democracy  in 
wealth,  there  was,  we  must  confess,  very  little. 
We  were  linked  to  tradition;  we  were  made 
profoundly  and  sincerely  liberal,  at  least  in  our 
theories  of  life ;  we  were  implored  to  stand  pat. 

And  though  education,  as  the  art  was  prac 
tised  here  in  America,  has  perhaps  kept  us  lib 
eral,  it  has  certainly  given  to  liberalism  that 
faint  shadow  of  unreality,  that  sacrosanctity 
which  belongs  to  all  traditional  beliefs.  It  is 
the  traditional  quality  of  American  education 

38 


CONSERVATIVE  AMERICA 

that  more  than  any  other  single  agency  has 
petrified  American  liberalism. 

We  plain  Americans  in  our-  little  red  school- 
houses  and  our  big  brick  high  schools  and  our 
spreading  universities  have  learned  republican 
ism  and  the  rights  of  man  and  the  not-to-be- 
questioned  opportunity  of  every  person  to  go 
to  the  top  of  the  ladder  if  he  wished  and  were 
able.  This  we  were  taught  explicitly  and  im 
plicitly.  And  we  believed  these  things  because 
we  were  made  to  think  that  all  right-thinking 
men  everywhere  believed  them;  and  therefore 
we  recited  Gladstone  and  Lincoln  and  Tous- 
saint  L'Ouverture  and  passages  from  Carlyle's 
"French  Revolution"  and  Mrs.  Browning  on 
the  freeing  of  Italy  with  confident  hearts. 
Furthermore,  we  felt  that  these  principles  were 
sincere,  because,  no  matter  how  poor  or  how 
stupid,  we  found  educational  opportunities 
opened  on  every  side.  There  was  no  discrimi 
nation  in  the  quantity  of  American  education, 
and  but  little  in  its  quality.  Until  we  left  the 

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EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

school  or  the  campus,  our  liberal  tradition  fitted 
us  like  a  garment.  It  never  occurred  to  us 
that  it  might  not  always  fit. 

Yet  as  soon  as  we  moved  out  into  America, 
crossing  that  bridge  from  theory  to  practice, 
from  ideas  to  application,  which  in  all  countries 
is  long  and  in  new  countries  longest  of  all, 
strange  contradiction  began  to  be  apparent. 
Republicanism,  it  appeared,  worked  out  in 
practice,  at  least  in  our  town,  into  boss  control 
and  domination  by  party  leaders,  acting  usu 
ally  for  vested  interests.  The  rights  of  man, 
we  discovered,  had  a  curious  sound  when  dis 
cussed  by  labor-unions  or  the  unemployed. 
Opportunities,  it  became  clear,  could  not  be 
freely  offered  to  the  man  without  capital  unless 
we  were  prepared  to  change  radically  an  in 
dustrial  system  which  our  common  sense  taught 
us  was  better — at  least  for  us — than  the  vision 
ary  industrial  democracies  that  radicals  with 
out  business  experience  wished  to  set  up. 
Were  these  precious  ideals  of  ours  merely  bun- 

40 


CONSERVATIVE  AMERICA 

combe,  then,  held  only  in  theory,  in  practice  to 
be  disregarded?  Or  was  democracy  good  as  a 
half-way  measure,  but  false  as  a  general  prin 
ciple?  Was  our  education  a  tradition  to  be 
reverenced — and  disregarded  ? 

Not  a  few  reached  the  indicated  conclusion, 
though  they  kept,  as  a  rule,  their  opinions  to 
themselves.  Perhaps  as  many  swung  to  the 
other  extreme,  believed  that  only  more  democ 
racy  would  cure  us,  and  also  kept  out  of  print, 
for  fear  of  being  associated  with  radical  aliens 
who  held  much  the  same  opinions  in  politics  and 
social  affairs,  but  very  different  conceptions  of 
cleanliness,  morals,  and  polite  conversation. 
These  were  our  right  and  left  wings  merely. 
The  great  mass  of  us,  the  everyday  Americans, 
took  things  as  they  were  with  a  kind  of  shrewd 
childish  good  sense,  and  pushed  ahead,  being 
as  democratic  as  was  convenient  in  this  un 
equal  world,  but  taking  no  nonsense  from 
people  who  would  interfere  with  business  in 
order  to  make  us  more  so.  And  that  is  where 

41 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

we  are  now — at  the  end  of  the  war,  in  the  midst 
of  a  world  revolution  so  great  that  no  one 
knows  whether  it  has  just  begun  or  is  just  end 
ing. 

But  a  revolution  drives  men  back  upon  their 
principles,  makes  them  scan  willingly  or  un 
willingly  the  things  they  live  by — the  preju 
dices,  enlightenments,  interpretations,  convic 
tions  that  in  the  largest  sense  are  their  educa 
tion.  And  this  is  true  not  only  of  rapid  revolu 
tions,  like  the  French  and  the  Russian,  but  of 
slow  ones,  such  as  that  revolution  which  has 
been  slowly  gathering  headway  in  English- 
speaking  countries  for  three  decades  or  more, 
that  revolution  of  social  and  industrial  condi 
tions  now  rapidly  accelerating.  And  what 
have  Americans  thought  of  their  education  ? 

I  think  they  have  found  it  a  brake,  a  stabil 
izer,  a  deterrent  alike  from  violent  reaction  and 
dangerous  experiment.  I  think  also  that  they 
have  found  it  what  it  is — traditional.  They 
have  felt  it  as  a  taboo,  good  on  Sundays,  but  on 

42 


CONSERVATIVE  AMERICA 

week-days  not  to  be  too  closely  regarded. 
Where  it  has  preached  restraint  to  the  more 
radical,  they  have  listened,  but  grown  restless. 
Was  it  not  John  Bright  who  said  that  England 
would  be  ruined  if  the  hours  for  labor  should 
be  shortened?  Did  not  Cooper,  who  wrote  the 
epic  of  frontier  freedom,  sharpen  his  pen  to 
defend  the  unearned  increment  of  the  landlord? 
Where  it  speaks  of  liberty  and  equality  to  the 
more  conservative,  they  have  listened,  but  not 
taken  it  too  seriously.  After  all,  the  world 
must  be  governed  and  dividends  paid.  While 
the  rights  of  the  citizen  should  be  safeguarded, 
business  is  business  nevertheless,  and  politics 
politics.  The  Declaration  of  Independence, 
they  felt,  should  be  kept  in  its  place,  which  was 
the  Fourth  of  July.  Theory — by  which  they 
meant  education — has  little  place  in  practical 
affairs.  They  were  liberals  of  course,  but 
plain  and  prosperous  Americans  first  of  all,  and 
the  latter,  at  least,  they  intended  to  remain. 
And  thus,  in  its  noble  attempt  to  shape  the 

43 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

minds  of  Americans  to  a  similitude  of  their 
full-blooded  ancestors  who  dared  to  be  radical, 
American  education  itself  has  acquired  the 
sanctity,  the  reverence,  the  ghostliness  of  the 
dead.  Like  the  dead,  it  is  most  influential 
upon  spirits  sensitive  to  the  past,  and  operates 
through  love  and  veneration  and  mere  habit 
rather  than  through  immediate  compulsion. 
Like  them,  it  visits  the  minds  of  the  living  only 
in  glimpses  of  the  moon,  and  its  influence, 
though  wide-spread,  is  partial  and  easily  for 
gotten  in  the  noonday  glare  of  active,  practical 
life.  Americans  respect  their  education,  but 
too  seldom  do  they  live  by  it. 

It  is  a  good  tradition,  this  American  ideal  of 
noble  and  sturdy  liberalism.  The  only  detrac 
tion  to  be  made  is  precisely  that  the  education 
which  embodies  it  is  felt  to  be  merely  tradi 
tional.  But  this  is  much  the  same  as  to  say 
that  last  year's  hat  is  a  good  hat,  the  only 
trouble  being  that  when  we  wear  it  we  invari 
ably  remember  that  it  is  last  year's  hat.  And 

44 


CONSERVATIVE  AMERICA 

at  least  one  unhappy  consequence  follows. 
American  minds  have  been  coddled  in  school 
and  college  for  at  least  a  generation.  There 
are  two  kinds  of  mental  coddling.  The  first 
belongs  to  the  public  schools,  and  is  one  of  the 
defects  of  our  educational  system  that  we  abuse 
privately  and  largely  keep  out  of  print.  It  is 
democratic  coddling.  I  mean,  of  course,  the 
failure  to  hold  up  standards,  the  willingness  to 
let  youth  wobble  upward,  knowing  little  and 
that  inaccurately,  passing  nothing  well,  grad 
uating  with  an  education  that  hits  and  misses 
like  an  old  type-writer  with  a  torn  ribbon. 
America  is  full  of  "sloppy  thinking,"  of  inac 
curacy,  of  half-baked  misinformation,  of  sen- 
timentalism,  especially  sentimentalism,  as  a  re 
sult  of  coddling  by  schools  that  cater  to  an 
easy-going  democracy.  Only  fifty-six  per 
cent  of  a  group  of  girls,  graduates  of  the  pub 
lic  schools,  whose  records  I  once  examined, 
could  do  simple  addition,  only  twenty-nine  per 
cent  simple  multiplication  correctly;  a  de- 

45 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

plorable  percentage  had  a  very  inaccurate 
knowledge  of  elementary  American  geography. 

A  dozen  causes  are  responsible  for  this  con 
dition,  and  among  them,  I  suspect,  one,  which 
if  not  major,  at  least  deserves  careful  ponder 
ing.  The  teacher  and  the  taught  have  some 
how  drifted  apart.  His  function  in  the  large 
has  been  to  teach  an  ideal,  a  tradition.  He 
is  content,  he  has  to  be  content,  with  partial 
results.  It  is  not  for  life  as  it  is,  it  is  for  wrhat 
life  ought  to  be,  that  he  is  preparing  even  in 
arithmetic;  he  has  allowed  the  faint  unreality 
of  a  priestcraft  to  numb  him.  In  the  mind  of 
the  student  a  dim  conception  has  entered,  that 
this  education — all  education — is  a  garment 
merely,  to  be  doffed  for  the  struggle  with  real 
ities.  The  will  is  dulled.  Interest  slackens. 

But  it  is  in  aristocratic  coddling  that  the  ef 
fects  of  our  educational  attitude  gleam  out  to 
the  least  observant  understanding.  This  is  the 
coddling  of  the  preparatory  schools  and  the  col 
leges,  and  it  is  more  serious  for  it  is  a  defect 

46 


CONSERVATIVE  AMERICA 

that  cannot  be  explained  away  by  the  hundred 
difficulties  that  beset  good  teaching  in  a  public- 
school  system,  nation-wide,  and  conducted  for 
the  young  of  every  race  in  the  American  men 
agerie.  The  teaching  in  the  best  American 
preparatory  schools  and  colleges  is  as  careful 
and  as  conscientious  as  any  in  the  world.  That 
one  gladly  asserts.  Indeed,  an  American  boy 
in  a  good  boarding-school  is  handled  like  a 
rare  microbe  in  a  research  laboratory.  He  is 
ticketed;  every  instant  of  his  time  is  planned 
and  scrutinized;  he  is  dieted  with  brain  food, 
predigested,  and  weighed  before  application. 
I  sometimes  wonder  if  a  moron  could  not  be 
made  into  an  Abraham  Lincoln  by  such  a  sys 
tem — if  the  system  were  sound. 

It  is  not  sound.  The  boys  and  girls,  espe 
cially  the  boys,  are  coddled  for  entrance  exam 
inations,  coddled  through  freshman  year,  cod 
dled  oftentimes  for  graduation.  And  they  too 
frequently  go  out  into  the  world  fireproof 
against  anything  but  intellectual  coddling. 

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EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

Such  men  and  women  can  read  only  writing 
especially  prepared  for  brains  that  will  take 
only  selected  ideas,  simply  put.  They  can 
think  only  on  simple  lines,  not  too  far  extended. 
They  can  live  happily  only  in  a  life  where  ideas 
never  exceed  the  college  sixty  per  cent  of  com 
plexity,  and  where  no  intellectual  or  esthetic 
experience  lies  too  far  outside  the  range  of 
their  curriculum.  A  world  where  one  reads 
the  news  and  skips  the  editorials ;  goes  to  musi 
cal  comedies,  but  omits  the  plays ;  looks  at  illus 
trated  magazines,  but  seldom  at  books;  talks 
business,  sports,  and  politics,  but  never  econom 
ics,  social  welfare,  and  statesmanship — that  is 
the  world  for  which  we  coddle  the  best  of  our 
youth.  Many  indeed  escape  the  evil  effects  by 
their  own  innate  originality;  more  bear  the 
marks  to  the  grave. 

The  process  is  simple,  and  one  can  see  it  in 
the  English  public  schools  (where  it  is  being  at 
tacked  vivaciously)  quite  as  commonly  as  here. 
You  take  your  boy  out  of  his  family  and  his 

48 


CONSERVATIVE  AMERICA 

world.  You  isolate  him  except  for  companion 
ship  with  other  nursery  transplantings  and 
teachers  themselves  isolated.  And  then  you 
feed  him,  nay,  you  cram  him,  with  good  tradi 
tional  education,  filling  up  the  odd  hours  with 
the  excellent,  but  negative,  passion  of  sport. 
Then  you  subject  him  to  a  special  cramming 
and  send  him  to  college,  where  sometimes  he 
breaks  through  the  net  of  convention  woven 
about  him,  and  sees  the  real  world  as  it  should 
appear  to  the  student  before  he  becomes  part 
of  it ;  but  more  frequently  wraps  himself  deep 
and  more  deeply  in  conventional  opinion,  con 
ventional  practice,  until,  the  limbs  of  his  intel 
lect  bound  tightly,  he  stumbles  into  the  outer 
world. 

And  there,  in  the  swirl  and  the  vivid  practi 
calities  of  American  life,  is  the  net  loosened? 
I  think  not.  I  think  rather  that  the  youth 
learns  to  swim  clumsily  despite  his  encum 
brances  of  lethargic  thinking  and  tangled  ideal 
ism.  But  if  they  are  cut?  If  he  goes  on  the 

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EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

sharp  rocks  of  experience,  finds  that  hardness, 
shrewdness,  selfish  individualism  pay  best  in 
American  life,  what  has  he  in  his  spirit  to  meet 
this  disillusion?  Of  what  use  has  been  his 
education  in  the  liberal,  idealistic  traditions  of 
America?  Of  some  use,  undoubtedly,  for 
habit,  even  a  dull  habit,  is  strong;  but  whether 
useful  enough,  whether  powerful  enough,  to 
save  America,  to  keep  us  "white"  in  the  newer 
and  more  colloquial  sense,  the  future  will  test 
and  test  quickly. 

Why  do  we  coddle  our  aristocracy,  who  can 
pay  for  the  best  and  most  effective  education? 
I  think  that  the  explanation  again  is  to  be 
sought  in  the  traditionalism  of  American  edu 
cation.  If  our  chief,  our  ultimate,  duty  to  the 
boy  that  we  teach  is  to  make  him  an  "American 
gentleman,"  and  if  by  thi$  is  meant  that  we  are 
to  instil  the  essence  of  the  Americanism  which 
made  Washington  and  Lincoln  and  Roosevelt, 
and  let  it  go  at  that,  and  if  all  our  education 
hovers  about  this  central  purpose — why,  the 

50 


CONSERVATIVE  AMERICA 

stage  is  set  for  a  problem  play  that  may  become 
tragedy  or  farce.  It  is  not  thinking  we  teach 
then  so  much  as  what  has  been  taught.  It  is 
not  life,  but  what  has  been  lived ;  not  American 
liberalism,  but  a  conservatism  that  never  has 
been  characteristically  American.  The  tradi 
tion  is  not  at  fault,  nor  the  thought  of  the  past, 
nor  the  lives  of  our  ancestors;  it  is  when  all 
these  things  are  taught  as  dead  idealism  unre 
lated  to  the  facts  of  the  present  that  they  be 
come  merely  traditional. 

And  the  boy  and  girl  are  not  deceived. 
They  take  all  that  is  given  them — no  youth  in 
the  world  are  so  pliable,  so  receptive  as  ours — 
and  retain  and  respect  and  cherish  what  they 
remember  of  it.  But  it  is  clear  that  for  them 
it  is  tradition,  it  is  unreal  in  comparison  with 
their  sports,  their  social  aspirations.  It  will 
be  unreal  in  comparison  with  their  business  and 
their  politics  and  their  household  affairs.  It 
will  be  a  venerated  tradition  of  liberal  think 
ing  for  them  of  which  they  will  be  highly  con- 
Si 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

servative.  But  it  will  not  function  in  their 
lives — not  more  at  least  than  the  sixty  per  cent 
that  they  sought  for  in  order  to  get  that  degree 
of  bachelor  of  arts  which  certified  that  they 
were  versed  in  the  thought  of  their  forefathers. 
And  so  they  merge  in  the  common  American 
mind  that  I  have  called  conservative-liberal. 

I  know  of  no  better  proof  of  the  truth  of 
what  I  have  just  written  than  the  history  of 
our  college  undergraduates  in  war-time. 

Here  is  such  a  demonstration  as  comes  only 
once  in  a  generation.  Of  all  unpreparedness, 
the  unpreparedness  of  the  undergraduate  for 
war  was  apparently  chief.  He  knew  little 
about  the  war,  its  causes,  its  manifestations, 
for  he  is  not  an  ardent  reader  of  current  events 
outside  his  college  world,  nor  does  he  hear 
much  of  the  talk  of  the  market-place.  He 
knew  little  about  war.  The  R.  O.  T.  C.  had 
spread  some  ideas  of  drill  and  discipline  and 
the  technic  of  fighting;  but  he  was  neither 
drilled  nor  disciplined  in  1917.  And  as  for 

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CONSERVATIVE  AMERICA 

the  training  in  accurate  obedience  and  in  exact 
thinking  which  war  is  supposed  to  demand,  he 
simply  did  not  have  it,  or  so  we  thought.  Nor 
had  his  particularistic  fashion  of  following  his 
own  little  contests  to  the  exclusion  of  loyalties 
to  the  world  outside,  and  his  indifference  to 
politics  beyond  fraternity  elections,  or  econom 
ics  beyond  the  cost  of  theater-tickets  and  beer, 
led  us  to  assume  a  ready  response  to  a  great 
moral  emergency  in  national  affairs. 

We  were  utterly  deceived.  The  response  of 
the  American  undergraduate  was  immediate 
and  magnificent.  He  crowded  into  the  most 
dangerous  military  professions,  and  was  emi 
nent  in  the  most  difficult  branches  of  organiza 
tion  and  experiment.  He  did  not,  it  is  true, 
think  very  broadly  about  the  war,  but  he 
thought  intensely.  He  did  not  learn  accuracy, 
steadiness,  independence  overnight,  but  he 
learned  them.  He  was  wholly  admirable. 
And  the  women,  who  in  ways  not  yet  suffi 
ciently  celebrated  made  it  possible  for  the 

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EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

country  to  stiffen  to  the  crisis,  were  as  eager  to 
serve  as  the  men. 

And  the  reason,  I  believe,  was  that  for  the 
time  the  education  of  the  undergraduate  ceased 
being  traditional  and  became  a  moving  force  in 
his  experience.  The  dim  liberal  idealism  in 
which  his  mind  had  been  moving  for  many 
years  suddenly  took  on  color  and  became  fire. 
Every  impulse  of  his  mental  training  urged 
him  to  do  just  what  was  asked  of  him,  to 
struggle  for  democracy,  for  justice,  for  a 
square  deal ;  to  believe  in  the  rights  of  man  and 
the  permanence  of  right  and  the  supremacy  of 
a  righteous  idealism.  And  his  habits  of  hard, 
earnest  play,  where  rules  were  obeyed  and  vic 
tory  went  to  the  best  player,  also  were  the  very 
stuff  the  world  wanted,  also  transformed  mi 
raculously  into  the  very  apparatus  of  war. 
His  traditional  education,  with  its  extra-cur 
riculum  of  games  that  also  were  traditional  in 
their  neglect  of  the  new  and  special  qualities 
required  for  success  in  modern  life,  precisely 

54 


CONSERVATIVE  AMERICA 

fitted  the  clamorous  need  of  the  hour.  And  the 
undergraduate  for  a  little  while  silenced  his 
critics,  amazed  his  friends,  and  was  in  many 
respects  happier  than  in  those  years  of  peace 
when  he  was  trying  to  bridge  the  gap  between 
his  education  and  life  as  it  was  being  lived  in 
America. 

And  with  peace  he  relapses — the  American 
in  general  relapses  into  the  old  discontinuity. 
The  crisis  of  self-defense  over,  our  ideals  once 
more  begin  to  seem  impractical,  traditionary. 
As  long  as  the  patriotism  lit  by  the  war  and 
danger  crackled  under  the  pot,  our  liberalism 
bubbled  ardently;  but  peace  chills  the  brew. 
For  peace  means  that  we  drop  our  ardors  and 
face  again  the  insistent  reachings  of  the  democ 
racy  for  a  greater  share  in  wealth,  for  a  greater 
control  over  productivity,  for  representation  in 
industry  as  well  as  in  politics.  Peace  means 
that  we  must  face  not  war,  with  its  romantic 
thrills  and  its  common  enemy,  but  the  prosaic 
causes  of  war  that  hide  among  friends  as  well 

55 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

as  enemies,  that  for  cure  demand  self-criticism, 
self-denial,  and  humbleness  of  spirit,  a  struggle 
in  which  the  Croix  de  Guerre  is  likely  to  be  re 
proach  and  contumely. 

The  break  between  our  education  and  the  life 
we  are  living  again  widens,  and  it  is  this  break 
which  emasculates  our  liberalism.  Viewed 
alone,  the  fine  ideals  of  our  education  are  easily 
defensible ;  the  hustling  vigor  of  our  life  is  also 
defensible.  The  trouble  is  that  in  ordinary 
times  they  fail  somehow  or  another  to  connect. 
Education  grows  bloodless.  Life  becomes 
aimless  or  merely  self-regarding.  What  we 
believe  grows  pallid  and  fades  before  it  trans 
mutes  into  what  we  do.  Indeed,  I  would  go 
further  and  say  that  Americans,  and  especially 
the  graduates  of  universities,  are  somewhat 
weakened  by  their  education.  They  go  out 
into  life  with  an  enormous  appetite  for  living 
and  a  set  of  ideals  like  a  row  of  preserved 
vegetables  canned  and  hermetically  sealed  for 
future  contingencies.  In  1917  and  1918  we 

56 


CONSERVATIVE  AMERICA 

opened  some  of  those  jars  and  found  the  con 
tents  good  for  a  special  emergency.  But  ordi 
narily  the  lids  are  tight,  while  we  go  about  our 
business  proud  of  our  stores  of  education,  but 
inwardly  uncertain,  like  the  housewife,  as  to 
whether  or  not  those  ideas  that  seemed  so  good 
when  our  teachers  packed  them  away  in  the 
season  of  youth  will  not  be  sour  to  the  taste  of 
practical  modernity. 

The  clamor  for  vocational  education  is  a  pro 
test  against  this  ineffectiveness  of  the  merely 
traditional.  But  the  cure  does  not  lie  in  such 
a  medicining.  Vocational  education  is  well 
enough,  and  we  need  more  of  it,  but  training  of 
the  hands  and  of  the  brain  to  purely  material 
accomplishments  will  never  save  liberalism  in 
America.  The  strength  of  vocational  educa 
tion  is  that  it  looks  forward  and  prepares  for 
things  as  they  are.  Its  weakness,  when  ad 
ministered  alone,  is  that  it  neglects  the  direct 
ing  mind.  In  any  large  sense  it  is  aimless,  or, 
rather,  it  aims  at  successful  slavery  quite  as 

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EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

much  as  at  successful  freedom.  Liberal  edu 
cation  also  must  look  forward,  must  put  its  tra 
ditions  to  work,  must  germinate,  and  become 
alive  in  the  mind  of  the  American,  and  then 
teach  him  by  old  principles  to  attack  new  prob 
lems. 

We  must  either  live  by  our  education  or  live 
without  it.  The  alternatives  are  desiccation 
and  anarchy.  If  we  live  by  it,  education  itself 
stays  alive,  grows,  sloughs  off  dead  matter, 
adapts  itself  like  an  organism  to  environment 
If  we  live  without  and  beyond  and  in  neglect  of 
education,  as  many  "practical"  Americans  have 
always  done  once  they  left  school  or  college, 
education  decays,  and  sooner  or  later  the  man 
decivilizes,  drifts  toward  that  mere  acceleration 
of  busyness,  which  is  the  modern  equivalent  of 
barbarism. 

Once  before,  and  far  more  seriously,  a  civili 
zation  was  threatened  because  its  education  be 
came  merely  traditional  and  ceased  to  function 


CONSERVATIVE  AMERICA 

in  practical  life.  The  society  of  Appolinaris 
Sidonius  in  the  fifth  century,  as  Dill  describes 
it,  was  faced  with  economic  disruption,  with 
hordes  of  aliens,  with  a  rampant  individualism 
that  put  the  acquisition  of  a  secure  fortune 
above  everything  else.  The  leaders  failed  to 
lead.  "Their  academic  training  only  deepened 
and  intensified  the  deadening  conservatism  of 
unassailable  wealth."  "Faith  in  Rome  had 
killed  all  faith  in  a  wider  future  for  humanity 
.  .  .  ."  There  was^an  "apparent  inability  to 
imagine,  even  in  the  presence  of  tremendous 
forces  of  disruption,  that  society  should  ever 
cease  to  move  along  the  ancient  lines."  Roman 
imperialism  divorced  itself  from  Roman 
thought  and  became  a  deadening  tyranny. 
Roman  thought  divorced  itself  from  Roman 
life  and  became  an  empty  philosophy.  And 
the  sixth  century  and  disaster  followed. 

The  historical  analogy  is  imperfect.     Our 
civilization  is  still  vigorous  where  the  Roman 

59 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

was  tired  and  weak.  No  outer  barbarians 
threaten  us.  Science  safeguards  us  from 
economic  breakdown. 

And  yet,  like  the  skeptic  who  does  not  believe 
in  God,  but  refuses  to  take  chances  on  his 
death-bed,  I  should  not  scoff  at  the  parallel. 
Stale  imperialism,  shaken  religions,  a  liberalism 
become  an  article  of  faith  not  an  instrument  of 
practice — all  these  are  potential  of  decay,  of  ex 
plosion.  We  must  look  to  our  education.  If 
it  does  not  grip  our  life,  we  must  change  edu 
cation.  If  life  is  not  gripped,  our  life  needs 
reforming.  And  the  thing  is  so  extraordi 
narily  difficult  that  it  is  high  time  we  ceased 
praising  for  a  while  the  virtues  of  our  fore 
fathers  or  the  wealth  of  our  compatriots,  and 
began  the  task.  After  all,  it  means  no  more 
than  to  teach  the  next  generation  not  merely  to 
preserve,  but  also  to  carry  on,  the  traditions  of 
America. 


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CHAPTER  III 

RADICAL   AMERICA 

IT  is  with  no  intention  to  be  paradoxical  that 
I  call  America  a  radical  nation.  I  know 
well  by  experience,  sometimes  galling,  what 
an  English  labor  leader  or  a  French  socialist 
thinks  of  America,  as  he  understands  it.  A 
mere  congestion  of  capital,  a  spawning-ground 
of  the  bourgeoisie,  the  birthplace  of  trusts, 
where  even  the  labor-unions  are  capitalistic. 
If  the  world  is  to  be  saved  for  democracy,  he 
says,  it  will  not  be  by  America. 

I  am  not  so  sure.  Being  one  of  those  who 
doubted  whether  the  successful  termination  of 
the  war  would  forever  make  safe  democratic 
ideals,  I  feel  at  liberty  to  doubt  whether  the 
triumph  of  a  European  proletariate  will  give  us 

61 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

what  we  want.  It  depends  much  upon  what 
one  means  by  democracy.  And  correspond 
ingly,  whether  America  is  fundamentally  radi 
cal  or  conservative  depends  much  upon  what 
one  means  by  radicalism.  If,  like  Louis  XIV 
or  Napoleon,  I  had  a  leash  of  writers  and 
scholars  at  my  command,  I  would  have  them 
produce  nothing  but  definitions  while  these 
critical  years  of  transition  lasted.  I  would 
make  them  into  an  academy  whose  fiat  in  gen 
eral  definition  would  be  as  valid  as  the  French 
Academy's  in  the  meaning  of  a  word.  I  would 
make  it  a  legal  offense  for  two  men  to  quarrel 
over  socialism  when  one  means  communism 
and  the  other  state  control  of  the  post-office.  I 
would,  like  the  early  Quakers,  require  arbitra 
tion  for  all  disputants,  especially  in  politics, 
knowing  that  a  clear  head  would  quickly  dis 
cover  that  arguers  on  democracy  conceivably 
meant  anything  from  a  standard  collar  for 
every  one  to  nationalization  of  women.  But 
the  good  old  days  of  literary  dictatorship  are 

62 


RADICAL  AMERICA 

past.  The  most  a  writer  upon  the  mind  of  the 
everyday  American  can  do  is  to  endeavor  hon 
estly  to  make  his  own  definitions  as  he  goes; 
and  I  believe  that  American  radicalism  needs  a 
good  deal  of  defining. 

It  is  not  the  doctrines  of  Babeuf  or  Marx  or 
Lenine  that  have  made  what  seems  to  be  the 
indigenous  variety  of  American  radicalism. 
Their  beliefs,  and  especially  those  of  Marx, 
have  found  acceptance  here.  There  are  mo 
ments  in  intellectual  or  industrial  development 
when  men's  minds  become  seeding-grounds  for 
ideas  blown  from  without.  There  were  cent 
uries  when  the  mystical  ideas  of  the  Christian 
East  were  sown  and  rooted  in  the  barbarian 
brains  of  the  West.  There  were  the  years 
when  the  liberal  ideas  of  the  French  Revolution 
were  blown  across  Italy,  Germany,  and  the 
Low  Countries.  And  much  that  we  call  radical 
in  America  is  simply  foreign  seed,  growing 
vigorously  in  our  soil,  but  not  yet  acclimated, 
as  it  is  growing  also  in  Russia  and  New  Zea- 

63 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

land.  And  much  is  not  American  in  any  sense, 
but  rather  the  purely  alien  ideas  of  immigrants 
— individual  men  among  us.  It  is  not  for 
nothing  that  Trotzky  was  here,  and  the  Marx 
ists,  the  syndicalists,  the  nihilists,  and  the  com 
munists  of  half  Europe.  We  have  been  ex 
posed  to  every  germ  of  radicalism  ever  hatched 
in  the  Old  World;  yet  neither  the  young  pro 
fessor,  lecturing  on  the  redistribution  of 
wealth,  nor  the  Russian  stevedore,  who  in 
lower  New  York  awaits  the  proletariate  revo 
lution,  truly  represents  American  radicalism. 
These  are  the  ideas  and  these  the  men  our  rest 
less  youth  are  borrowing  from,  but  they  are  not 
yet,  they  may  never  be,  American. 

It  is  fortunately  not  yet  difficult  to  separate 
foreign  from  indigenous  radicalism.  There  is 
that  in  both  our  heredity  and  our  environment 
which  makes  the  American  mind  bad  soil  for 
the  seed  of  foreign  ideologies.  They  rain  upon 
us,  they  germinate;  but  they  do  not  make  a 
crop.  We  are  too  self-reliant,  too  concrete; 


RADICAL  AMERICA 

our  New  World  has  kept  us  too  cheerfully 
busy;  the  heavens  of  opportunity  have  leaned 
too  low  over  this  blessed  America  for  discon 
tent  which  leads  to  dreaming,  oppression  which 
makes  revolt,  to  be  common  among  us.  We 
"old  Americans/'  at  least  of  this  generation, 
are  poor  material  for  Bolshevism;  even  as 
socialists  we  are  never  more  than  half  con 
vinced.  Our  radicalism  has  been  of  a  different 
breed. 

Indeed,  radicalism,  like  religion  and  sea- 
water,  takes  color  from  the  atmosphere  in 
which  it  is  found.  The  French  radical  pos 
sesses  the  lucidity  and  the  self-regarding  spirit 
of  the  modern  French  mind.  He  lends  ideas, 
but  does  not  propagate  them.  The  English 
radical  seeks  his  ends  by  direct  political  action 
in  good  English  fashion.  And  the  native 
American  has  his  own  way  also.  That  its 
essential  quality  of  radicalism  has  often  been 
overlooked,  while  the  term  has  been  bandied 
among  soapbox  orators  and  devotees  of  the 

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EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

bomb,  is  natural,  but  unfortunate  for  clear 
thinking. 

Our  home-bred  radicalism  has  been  physical 
and  moral,  not  intellectual.  It  has  been  a 
genuine  attempt  to  tear  down  and  rebuild,  but 
it  has  not  ordinarily  been  called  radicalism, 
which  term  has  been  usually  applied  to  radi 
cal  thinking,  to  the  intellectual  radicalism  of 
revolutionary  organizations  and  protestants 
against  the  social  order.  Our  effective  rad 
icals  have  been  the  leaders,  not  the  oppo 
nents,  of  American  society.  They  have  been 
business  men,  philanthropists,  educators,  not 
strike-leaders,  social  workers,  and  philoso 
phers. 

I  talked  recently  to  the  head  of  a  great  manu 
facturing  plant  where  technical  skill  both  of 
hand  and  of  brain  was  exercised  upon  wood 
and  brass  and  steel.  The  modern  world,  ac 
cording  to  his  viewing  (which  was  very  ob 
viously  from  the  angle  of  business)  is  divided 
into  two  categories,  executives  and  engineers. 

66 


RADICAL  AMERICA 

Executives  are  the  men  who  organize  and  con 
trol.  They  are  the  ones  chiefly  rewarded. 
Engineers  invent  and  carry  out.  They  are  the 
experts.  It  is  the  executives  who  lead ;  the  ex 
perts  supply  ideas,  work  out  methods,  but  fol 
low. 

This  statement  may  be  disputable,  and  it  is 
certainly  a  painfully  narrow  bed  in  which  to 
tuck  American  life  and  American  ideals. 
Nevertheless,  it  has  at  least  one  element  of  pro 
found  truth.  In  the  world  of  physical  en 
deavor  and  physical  organization  it  is  executive 
business  men  who  have  changed,  broken  up,  re 
organized,  developed  the  material  world  of 
America.  They  have  fearlessly  scrapped  the 
whole  machinery  of  production,  transporta 
tion,  and  trade  as  it  existed  in  the  last  genera 
tion,  and  in  many  respects  improved  upon,  or 
destroyed  by  competition,  the  parallel  order  in 
the  Old  World.  They  have  been  true  radicals 
of  the  physical  category,  and  their  achieve 
ments  have  been  as  truly  radicalism  as  the  ex- 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

periments  of  Lenine  in  government  ownership. 
That  it  is  a  physical  radicalism,  dealing  with 
material  values  chiefly  and  without  reference 
to  some  of  the  greatest  needs  of  the  human 
spirit,  does  not  mean  that  intellect  of  a  high,  if 
not  the  highest,  order  may  not  have  been  re 
quired  for  its  successful  accomplishment. 

Our  other  native  radicals,  the  philanthropists 
and  the  educators,  have  also  been  chiefly  execu 
tives.  Their  work  has  been  inspired  by  the 
stored-up  moral  force  of  America,  especially 
puritan  America.  But  their  great  achieve 
ments,  like  those  of  the  business  men,  have  been 
in  organization  and  development  rather  than  in 
thought. 

In  earlier  generations  our  moral  radicals 
were  such  men  as  Emerson  and  Whitman. 
To-day  they  are  college  presidents,  organizers 
of  junior  high-school  systems,  or  heads  of 
the  Rockefeller  and  Carnegie  foundations — 
prime  movers  all  of  them  in  systems  of  edu 
cational  or  philanthropic  practice  that  uplift 

68 


RADICAL  AMERICA 

millions  at  a  turn  of  a  jack-screw.  And  these 
men  in  any  true  sense  of  the  word  are  radi 
cals — so  radical  in  their  thoroughgoing  at 
tempts  to  transform  society  by  making  it  more 
intelligent,  healthier,  more  productive  that  all 
Europe  is  protesting  or  imitating  them.  Who 
is  exercising  a  greater  pressure  for  durable 
change  upon  the  largest  number,  who  is  dig 
ging  most  strenuously  about  the  roots  of  the  old 
order,  John  Rockefeller,  Jr.  and  his  co-workers 
or  Trotzky  ?  It  is  not  easy  to  say. 

This  essay  is  not  propaganda,  and  I  am  not 
particularly  concerned  as  to  whether  or  no  the 
reader  accepts  my  broadening  of  the  term 
"radicalism."  Time  may  force  him  to  do  so, 
for  no  one  can  tell  in  a  given  age  just  what 
actions  and  what  theories  will  lead  to  the  tear 
ing  up  of  old  institutions  and  the  planting  of  a 
new  order.  Those  absolutist  kings,  Philip 
Augustus  and  his  successors,  who  crushed  to 
gether  the  provinces  of  France,  were,  we  see 
now,  radicals,  though  power  and  privilege  were 

69 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

their  motives.  I,  however,  am  interested  in 
men  rather  than  in  categories,  and  the  philan 
thropist  radicals,  the  business  radicals,  and  the 
educational  pioneers  of  America  already  in 
terest  the  world  strangely. 

What  they  are  in  essence  is  of  course  more 
important  than  the  name  we  give  them.  And 
first  of  all  I  believe  that  in  a  genuine,  if  nar 
row,  sense  they  have  been  idealistic;  indeed, 
that  their  American  idealism  has  made  them 
radical.  If  America  at  present  is  actively, 
practically  idealistic  (something  Europe  and 
the  world  in  general  would  like  to  have  de 
termined)  it  is  due  to  them. 

Idealism  is  not  a  negative  virtue.  It  is  not 
mysticism.  It  is  not  meditation,  though  it  may 
be  its  fruit.  Whatever  idealism  may  be  in 
philosophical  definition,  in  life  it  is  the  desire 
and  the  attempt  to  put  into  practice  conceptions 
of  what  ought  theoretically  to  be  accomplished 
in  this  imperfect  world;  and  the  quality  of  the 

70 


<  RADICAL  AMERICA 

idealism  depends  upon  the  quality  of  the  ideal 
ist. 

In  this  sense — a  true  sense  for  America, 
however  inapplicable  to  the  Middle  Ages — who 
can  doubt  that  such  Americans  as  I  have  de 
scribed  are  idealistic?  Nowhere  in  the  world 
are  there  more  visible  evidences  of  the  desires 
of  men  wreaking  themselves  upon  earth  and 
stone  and  metal,  upon  customs  and  government 
and  morals,  than  in  this  new  continent.  And 
these  desires  are  predominantly  for  betterment, 
for  perfection — a  low  perfection  sometimes,  it 
is  true — for  the  "uplift,"  physically,  morally, 
intellectually  of  humanity. 

Of  course  the  quality  of  American  idealism 
is  mixed.  Beside  the  pure  ambition  of  a  St. 
Francis  to  make  men  brothers,  beside  the  aspir 
ing  hope  of  the  cathedral  builders  to  make  faith 
lovely  to  the  eye,  the  ideal  of  a  chain  of  five- 
and-ten  cent  stores,  or  a  railroad  system,  or 
even  a  democratic  method  of  education,  is  not 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

a  luminous,  not  a  spiritual,  idealism.  But  a 
working  ideal  for  the  benefit  of  the  race  it  may 
be,  and  often  is. 

The  truth  of  this  has  not  seemed  obvious  to 
Europeans  or  to  most  Americans.  Our  in 
dividualism  has  been  so  intense  and  often  so 
self-seeking,  our  preoccupation  since  the  Civil 
War  so  dominantly  with  matter  rather  than 
with  mind  or  spirit,  that  it  is  easy  for  foreign 
ers  to  call  us  mere  money-grubbers.  Yet  no 
one  who  has  ever  talked  with  a  "captain  of  in 
dustry"  or  the  director  of  a  great  philanthropic 
enterprise  feels  doubt  as  to  the  unsoundness  of 
this  description.  Unfair,  narrow,  material- 
minded  we  may  have  been,  but  our  enterprises 
have  had  vision  behind  them,  dreams,  perhaps, 
imposed  upon  us  by  the  circumstances  of  a  new, 
raw,  continent,  by  wealth  for  the  seeking,  by 
opportunities  for  the  making,  by  vast  battles 
with  nature  to  be  organized  and  won. 

Furthermore,  behind  and  beneath  all  our 
striving,  sets  of  moral  ideas  have  been  active. 

72 


RADICAL  AMERICA 

America  has  never  been  blase  or  cynical.  We 
have  never  relinquished  the  ethics  of  puritan- 
ism,  which  are  the  ethics  of  the  Bible.  Even 
the  greedy  capitalist  has  disgorged  at  last,  and 
devoted  his  winnings  to  the  improvement  of  the 
society  he  preyed  upon.  But  most  American 
capitalists  have  not  been  greedy.  They  them 
selves  have  been  devoured  by  a  consuming  de 
sire  to  accomplish,  to  build  up,  to  put  through. 
When  they  have  broken  laws,  it  is  because  the 
laws  have  held  them  back  from  what  seemed  to 
them  necessary,  inevitable  development  for  the 
greater  good  of  all — because,  in  a  word,  they 
were  radical. 

One  night  in  war-time,  at  a  base  port  in  Scot 
land  far  from  our  own  environment  and  our 
native  prejudices,  I  heard  the  self-told  tale  of 
an  arch-enemy  of  American  "interests,"  a 
pugnacious  man  who  had  fought  and  won,  with 
a  price  on  his  head,  sent  millionaires  to  jail, 
been  calumniated,  been  trapped  by  infamous 
conspiracies,  and  escaped  them — a  man  better 

73 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

hated,  better  loved  than  is  the  fortune  of  most 
of  us.  My  other  companion  was  another 
American,  a  young,  but  celebrated,  preacher,  a 
moralist  of  the  breed  of  the  Beechers  and  the 
Spurgeons.  And  the  same  question  rose  to  our 
lips  when  the  story  was  finished.  These  ene 
mies,  these  magnates  who  had  been  jailed  and 
defeated,  and  yet  still  fought  and  often  success 
fully,  were  they  mere  self-seekers,  rascals,  by 
any  fair  definition?  And  neither  of  us  was 
satisfied  with  that  answer,  nor  was  the  hero  of 
the  story.  Two  of  us  at  least  agreed  that  it 
was  rather  a  case  of  "enterprise"  versus  "social 
justice,"  of  individualistic  effort  versus  the 
rights  of  a  community.  The  zeal  of  the  cap 
italists  had  burned  in  their  hearts  until  they 
broke  through  morality  in  an  effort  to  make 
good. 

But  of  course  most  of  our  American  radicals 
have  not  been  even  illegal  in  their  idealism. 
Their  zeal  has  encountered  only  obstinacy,  stu 
pidity,  and  the  intractable  conservatism  of  ordi- 

74 


RADICAL  AMERICA 

nary  life.  These  men  have  built  up  great  in 
dustries  that  made  life  more  facile,  or  extended 
great  educational  and  health  enterprises  over 
States  and  beyond  seas,  with  little  harm  to  any 
man  and  much  good  to  most,  unless  the  source 
of  the  wealth  expended  be  questioned,  or  the 
effect  of  a  zealot's  ideas  enforced  upon  mil 
lions. 

Indeed,  if  strength  of  purpose,  if  energy,  if 
a  burning  desire  to  change,  to  better  the  minds, 
the  bodies,  or  the  tools  of  men,  were  all  that 
could  be  asked  of  radicalism,  then  we  might 
well  rest  content  with  the  achievements  of  the 
American  idealist-radical.  But  more  has  been 
asked  of  the  reformer,  even  of  the  reformer  of 
business  methods,  than  energy  and  will.  The 
radicalism  I  have  described,  based  upon  com 
mon  sense  and  inspired  by  restless  virility,  has 
not  always  been  adequate.  The  pioneering 
days  are  ended  when  a  good  shot  could  always 
get  game,  a  strong  arm  always  find  plowlands. 
It  is  time  to  take  thought.  And  if  one  com- 

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EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

pares  the  uprooting  energy  of  Americans  with 
the  intellectual  radicalism  of  Europe  or  with 
the  new  radicalism  of  the  incoming  American 
generation,  a  curious  difference  appears.  Our 
old  radicalism  was  perhaps  healthier,  certainly 
more  productive  of  immediate  betterment  to 
those  who  profited  by  it ;  but  it  is  harder  to  de 
fine,  harder  to  follow  into  a  probable  future,  be 
cause,  when  all  is  said,  it  is  relatively  aimless. 
Where  do  our  vast  business  enterprises  lead? 
Toward  a  greater  production  of  this  world's 
goods,  toward  an  accumulation  of  wealth  in  the 
hands  of  the  sturdy  organizers;  but  equally 
toward  a  vast  corporate  machine  in  which  the 
individual  man  becomes  a  particle  lost  in  the 
mass,  toward  a  society  which  produces  wealth 
without  learning  to  distribute  or  employ  it  for 
the  purposes  of  civilization.  I  do  not  say  that 
this  latter  port  is  our  destination.  I  say  that 
our  business  leaders  are  steering  a  course 
which  is  just  as  likely  to  land  us  there  as  any- 


RADICAL  AMERICA 

where.  Or,  rather,  they  are  stoking  the  en 
gines  and  letting  the  rudder  go  free. 

And  is  our  vast  educational  enterprise  any 
more  definitely  aimed?  Perhaps  so,  for  the 
increase  of  intelligence  is  an  end  in  itself. 
Nevertheless,  for  what,  let  us  say,  is  the  Amer 
ican  high  school  preparing,  a  new  social  order, 
or  the  stabilization  of  the  old  one  ?  When  the 
aristocrats  and  the  burghers  of  Europe  began 
to  be  educated,  they  tore  themselves  apart  in 
furious  wars  over  religion.  When  the  West 
ern  proletariate  becomes  educated,  will  it  not 
tear  our  social  fabric  in  class  wars  also  ?  Are 
we  educating  for  this  or  against  it  ?  For  what 
kind  of  society  are  we  educating?  The  social 
ist  has  his  answer.  Can  American  school 
boards  say? 

And  our  organized  philanthropists,  combat 
ing  hookworm,  tuberculosis,  lynching,  child  la 
bor,  liquor,  slums,  and  preventable  crime? 
The  medieval  church,  hampered  by  its  lack  of 

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EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

science  and  the  waywardness  of  its  world,  en 
gaged  in  such  a  struggle,  and  from  a  thousand 
monasteries,  built,  like  our  modern  founda 
tions,  upon  the  profits  of  exploitation,  strove  to 
uplift  Europe.  Its  aim  and  end  were  clear :  to 
practise  charity  that  the  souls  of  workers  and 
donors  might  be  saved ;  to  clothe  the  naked  and 
feed  the  hungry  that  love  might  be  felt  to 
govern  the  world.  And  the  church  succeeded 
in  its  measure  until,  on  the  somewhat  specious 
plea  that  not  love,  but  justice,  was  demanded, 
rapacious  governments  seized  the  capital  of  the 
ecclesiastical  corporations  and  sold  the  abbeys 
for  building  stone  and  lead. 

Our  great  organizations  are  more  efficient 
than  the  church,  because  they  are  more  scien 
tific.  Whether  they  are  more  successful  de 
pends  upon  one's  estimate  of  success.  The 
modern  man,  for  whom  they  care,  is  a  cleaner, 
brighter,  more  long-lived  person  than  his 
medieval  ancestor.  He  is  probably  better  ma 
terial  for  civilization,  because,  if  more  vulgar- 

78 


RADICAL  AMERICA 

ized,  he  is  more  intelligent.  That  he  is  happier 
is  not  so  certain.  The  church  inspired  a  con 
fidence  (not  always  justified)  in  the  friendli 
ness  of  destiny  which  the  Rockefeller  Founda 
tion  has  so  far  failed  to  equal.  Nevertheless, 
scientific  philanthropy,  though  it  promises  less, 
achieves  what  it  does  promise  more  thoroughly 
and  without  those  terrible  by-products  of  the 
ecclesiastical  system — servility,  pauperism, 
bigotry,  and  superstition.  But  what  is  its  aim  ? 
With  little  more  regard  to  the  source  of  their 
wealth  than  the  church,  the  philanthropies  of 
to-day  have  far  less  regard  for  the  final  results 
of  their  benefactions.  As  with  the  educators, 
it  is  enough  for  them,  so  to  speak,  to  improve 
the  breed.  The  apparent  philosophy  behind 
their  program  is  that  when  the  proletariate  is 
bathed,  educated,  and  made  healthy,  it  will  be 
civilized,  and  therefore  competent  to  take  over 
the  world  (including  universities  and  steel 
mills,  railroads  and  hospitals)  and  run  it.  But 
the  executives  of  these  great  organizations 

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EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

would  probably  protest  against  this  reading  of 
their  expectations  almost  as  quickly  as  the 
donors  of  the  funds;  certainly  they  show  no 
readiness  to  meet  the  proletariate  half-way  on 
its  upward  path.  Clearly,  you  cannot  wash, 
teach,  and  invigorate  society  without  power 
fully  affecting  the  whole  social  fabric.  The 
feeble  experiments  of  the  nineteenth  century  in 
universal  education  have  already  proved  that. 
Some  transformation  the  great  endowments  of 
our  age  are  laboring  to  bring  about.  For  the 
creating  of  a  new  race  they  have  a  plan,  but 
not  for  its  salvation,  even  on  this  side  of 
heaven.  Indeed,  as  the  German  experience 
shows,  they  may  even  become  instruments  by 
which  the  common  man  is  made  a  mere  tool 
firmly  grasped  by  the  hand  of  authority.  Com 
mon  sense  alone  governs  them.  Their  vision 
is  bent  upon  the  immediate,  not  the  ultimate, 
future. 

A  little  vague  these  criticisms  may  seem  to 
the  practical  mind;  and  vague,  when  philo- 

80 


RADICAL  AMERICA 

sophically  considered,  are  the  aims  of  Ameri 
can  radicalism.  Very  different,  indeed,  they 
are  from  the  clean-cut  programs  of  the 
European  radical.  There  is  little  vagueness  in 
socialism,  little  vagueness  in  syndicalism,  the 
very  opposite  of  vagueness,  despite  the  efforts 
of  the  American  press,  in  Bolshevism.  In  all 
these  systems  the  past  is  condemned,  the 
present  reconstructed,  and  the  future  made 
visible  with  a  lucidity  that  betrays  their  origin 
in  efforts  of  the  pure  reason.  That,  of  course, 
is  the  difficulty — at  least  to  American  and  most 
British  intelligences.  The  aim  of  Bolshevism 
is  so  definite  as  to  be  almost  mathematical. 
Society  as  a  whole  is  considered  economically, 
and  a  program  deduced  that  will  fill  the  most 
mouths  with  the  least  labor.  To  be  sure, 
stomach-filling  is  not  the  sole  purpose  of  Lenine 
and  his  followers.  They  argue,  and  with  more 
right  than  our  easy-going  bourgeois  civilization 
is  willing  to  concede,  that  idleness,  unrest,  and 
crime  are  more  often  the  result  than  the  cause 

81 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

of  poverty.  Nevertheless,  the  type  radical  of 
the  European  variety  does  unquestionably  rest 
his  case  upon  the  premise  that  man  is  merely  a 
tool-using  animal.  Ask  a  Bolshevik  where 
civilization  is  going,  and  he  will  answer  you 
with  ease  and  explicitness.  Ask  the  average 
American,  and  he  will  either  reply  in  vague 
platitudes  or  deny  both  knowledge  and  respon 
sibility.  Of  the  two  men  he  is  less  likely  to  be 
wrong. 

And  note  well  that  our  domesticated  social 
ists  and  intelligentzia,  though  far  more  in 
clined  to  consider  the  human  factor  than  the 
Bolsheviki,  have  the  same  advantage  of  clarity 
of  aim,  and  the  same  tendency  to  confuse  ideas 
with  facts.  Common  sense — not  the  highest 
virtue,  not  the  virtue  which  will  save  our  souls, 
or  even  our  bodies,  in  a  crisis  like  war  or  a 
turmoil  of  the  spirit — is  often  lacking  in  the 
socialist.  Good  humor — again  not  a  quality 
that  wins  heaven's  gates,  but  a  saving  grace, 
nevertheless — is  noticeably  absent  from  the 

82 


RADICAL  AMERICA 

columns  of  our  radical  weeklies.  An  admir 
able  service  they  are  rendering  in  clarifying  the 
American  mind,  in  forcing  it,  or  some  of  it,  to 
face  issues,  to  think  things  through,  to  be  in 
telligent  as  well  as  sensible;  but  the  logical 
rigidity  of  their  program  inhibits  that  sense  of 
proportion  which  recognizes  the  Falstaffs  and 
the  Micawbers  of  this  world,  smiles  sometimes 
over  miscarriages  of  idealism,  sympathizes 
with  feeble,  humorous  man,  does  not  always 
scold. 

And  yet  the  American  who  dislikes  scolding 
should  beware  of  superciliousness.  It  is  much 
easier  for  genial  folks  to  chide  the  critics  with 
programs  than  to  be  critical  of  themselves. 
The  normal  American  is  a  product  of  Ameri 
can  education,  with  its  insistence  upon  liberal 
progress,  upon  acceleration  toward  the  vaguest 
of  goals.  It  has  not  taught  him  to  be  critical 
of  others  in  any  thorough-going  fashion,  it  has 
not  taught  him  to  be  critical  of  himself.  The 
confidence  that  has  carried  our  business  to  a 

83 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

maximum,  that  has  flung  our  schools  broadcast, 
and  swept  our  philanthropies  over  the  world, 
spelled  differently  is  self-assurance.  Nothing 
disturbs  us  so  much  as  to  be  told  to  stop  and 
think.  Nothing  angers  the  business  world  so 
much  as  legislation  that  "halts  business." 
Nothing  infuriates  an  educational  organizer 
more  than  to  question  the  quality,  not  the 
quantity,  of  his  product.  We  have  seen  clearly 
what  we  wished  to  do  with  iron  and  coal  and 
food.  We  have  felt,  in  education  and  philan 
thropy,  sure  of  our  moral  bases.  Our  energy 
has  been  concentrated  on  going  ahead.  To  be 
radical  intellectually,  to  think  it  all  out  in  terms 
of  a  possible  relation  of  labor  and  capital,  of 
a  possible  education,  of  a  possible  society  for 
the  future — that  has  not  appealed  to  us.  We 
have  shunned  philosophical  programs  by  in 
stinct,  and  wilfully  built  for  to-day  instead  of 
tomorrow.  The  American  radical  has  done 
too  little  thinking;  the  European,  perhaps  too 
much. 


RADICAL  AMERICA 

But  the  infection  of  thought  is  spreading.  I 
do  not  believe  that  the  youths  who  will  make 
the  coming  generation — the  youths  that  fought 
the  war — are  going  to  be  radicals  in  the  sense 
that  I  have  called  European.  If  the  ideas  of 
Marx  and  Lenine  ever  take  root  in  America,  it 
will  be  because  social  injustice  such  as  we  have 
not  yet  been  cursed  with  makes  a  soil  for  them. 
If  they  take  root,  they  transform  in  the  grow 
ing,  like  foreign  plants  in  California  weather. 
But  the  new  generation  is  not  like  the  old.  It 
is  more  sensitive  to  the  winds  of  doctrine.  It 
is  less  empirical,  less  optimistic,  less  self-as 
sured. 

Already  one  can  divide  into  two  classes  the 
undergraduates  as  one  finds  them  in  American 
colleges.  The  smaller  group  their  elders  would 
call  radical.  But  they  are  not  socialists,  not 
anarchists,  not  even  consistently  liberal.  More 
truly,  they  are  critics  of  things  as  they  are. 
Their  minds  are  restless ;  they  are  ever  seeking 
for  definitions,  for  solutions,  for  a  cause  to  en- 

85 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

roll  under.  They  are  restless  under  the  push 
of  common  sense  America  that  drives  them  into 
activity  without  explanation.  They  are  pain 
fully  aware  of  the  difference  between  their 
ideas  and  the  conditions  of  life  in  modern  so 
ciety,  and  are  determined  to  test  one  by  the 
other.  Their  native  idealism  has  become  in 
tellectual. 

The  other  group  is  far  larger,  but,  if  less 
restless,  is  no  more  static.  Most  of  its  mem 
bers  are  indifferent  to  the  new  ideas  scintillat 
ing  all  over  the  world,  if  indeed  they  are  not 
ignorant  of  them.  Nevertheless,  their  faith  in 
society  as  it  was  is  curiously  weak.  If  few  of 
them  are  likely  to  become  socialists,  few  also 
will  be  inspired  by  the  physical  and  moral  ideal 
ism  of  their  fathers.  The  naive  enthusiasm  of 
those  fathers  for  "movements/'  "ideals,"  "pro 
gress"  is  not  (unless  I  miss  my  guess)  common 
among  them.  They  are  not  likely  to  overturn 
America  a  second  time  in  order  to  make  great 
fortunes ;  philanthropy  does  not  interest  them ; 

86 


RADICAL  AMERICA 

i 
education  as  a  missionary  endeavor  does  not 

seem  to  attract  them.  Their  moral  founda 
tions  are  less  solid  than  in  old  days ;  their  ener 
gies  less  boundless;  aimless  endeavor  for  the 
sake  of  doing  something  is  no  longer  a  lure. 
Either  they  will  find  a  program  of  their  own  to 
excite  them,  or  stand  pat  upon  the  fortune  they 
expect  to  inherit.  If  their  future  is  to  be  nar 
rowed  to  a  choice  between  pleasure  and  mere 
productivity,  why,  then  these  men  would  rather 
run  motor-cars  than  make  them.  There  is  a 
very  real  danger  that  rather  than  hustle  for  the 
sake  of  hustling,  they  will  prefer  to  "lie  down" 
on  their  job.  And  thanks  to  the  homogeneity 
of  the  current  American  mind,  this  analysis,  if 
it  is  true  at  all,  is  true  of  thousands. 

The  American  radical  in  the  future,  I  take  it, 
will  still  be  idealist,  but  not  Bolshevik.  That 
generalization  from  the  needs  of  poverty  is  at 
the  same  time  too  material  to  suit  his  temper, 
which  is  still  fundamentally  moral,  and  too  rash 
economically  to  sit  with  his  practical  common 

87 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

sense.  He  will  remain  an  idealist;  but  a 
sharpening  of  his  intellect  will  give  teeth  to  his 
idealism,  and  the  practical  common  sense  he 
will  carry  over  from  the  days  when  his  kind 
were  pioneers  in  a  new  world  will  steady  him. 
What  he  will  want  is  not  yet  clear,  except  that 
it  will  certainly  not  be  the  world  of  Marx  or 
the  kaiser  (himself  in  many  respects  a  radical). 
What  he  will  do  I  cannot  venture  to  guess. 
But  if  one  dare  not  prophesy,  one  may  at  least 
hope. 

And  my  hope  is  that  a  principle  now  visibly 
at  work  among  many  Americans  may  guide 
him  also.  Principles,  if  they  are  sound,  have 
a  way  of  making  themselves  felt  through  the 
padding  of  mental  habit  and  convention,  like 
knobs  in  a  chair-seat. 

The  principle  I  have  in  mind  is  merely  this : 
that  a  man's  character  and  the  ideas  upon 
which,  so  to  speak,  he  operates  must  be  ap 
praised  separately.  Tenacity  of  will,  honesty 
of  spirit,  tenderness  of  heart — such  elements 


RADICAL  AMERICA 

of  character  make  a  man  neither  conservative 
nor  radical,  but  they  cannot  be  left  out  of  polit 
ical  accounting. 

And  my  hope  is  that  the  new  generation  is 
going  to  be  forced  toward  such  a  weighing  and 
discrimination  of  character  and  policies. 
Their  mental  padding  has  worn  thin  in  war 
time.  The  moral  conventions  that  we  have  ac 
cepted  almost  unhesitatingly  here  in  America 
no  longer  protect  the  youth  with  certainty  from 
the  shrewd  blows  of  rationalism  or  superstition. 

Therefore  ideas  and  character  are  both  likely 
to  be  more  closely  inspected  in  the  days  that  are 
coming.  The  conservative  minded,  as  in  the 
past,  will  emphasize  character ;  and  as  that  is  a 
much  better  platform  to  stand  on  than  mere  ob 
stinacy  or  self-interest,  they  will  presumably  be 
better  conservatives,  provided  that  the  intel 
lectual  unrest  of  the  times  forces  them  to  think. 
The  radicals  will  search  for  ideas  that  may 
transform  the  future,  and  if  the  abundance  of 
ideas  in  relation  to  the  paucity  of  accomplish- 

89 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

ment  causes  them  to  put  a  higher  value  upon 
character,  why,  so  much  for  the  better  radical 
ism. 

No  future  in  the  history  of  the  world  has 
been  so  interesting  as  is  the  immediate  future 
of  America.  Our  next  great  political  leader, 
who  may  be  conservative,  but  is  probably  radi 
cal,  is  now  in  college  or  has  but  lately  been 
graduated — unless,  indeed,  he  has  just  been  ad 
mitted  to  a  labor-union.  And  he  is  studying, 
one  hopes,  the  men  who  dealt  most  heavily 
in  character,  the  amiable  McKinley,  the  fiercely 
instinctive  Roosevelt ;  he  is  studying  the  careers 
of  the  men  who  have  been  dominated  chiefly  by 
ideas,  the  moral  idealist  Wilson,  the  ruthless 
thinker  Lenine.  He  is  learning,  one  hopes, 
when  and  why  each  and  all  failed,  each  and  all 
in  their  measure  succeeded.  Whether  he 
profits,  and  we  profit,  from  their  experience, 
time  alone  will  discover. 


90 


CHAPTER  IV 

AMERICAN    IDEALISM 

IS  American  idealism  a  virtue,  a  disease,  or 
an  illusion?  The  question  cannot  be 
answered  in  an  essay.  It  is  like  the  inquiry 
with  which  Tennyson  threatened  the  flower  in 
the  crannied  wall — what  man  is,  and  what  God 
is?  But  it  can  be  turned  and  twisted;  it  can 
be  made  ready  for  answering.  The  writer, 
and  perhaps  the  reader,  can  seek  an  answer  to 
it ;  and  that  is  better  than  the  inner  feeling  of 
many  an  American  just  now,  who,  weary  of 
five  years  of  idealistic  oratory,  profoundly  be 
lieves  that  American  idealism  is  first  of  all  a 
nuisance. 

Yet  it  was  never  so  easy  to  make  a  case  for 
the  virtue  of  idealism  as  in  retrospect  of  the 

91 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

years  1914-18.  What  many  have  never 
grasped  in  the  confusion  of  the  times  is  that 
exactly  the  same  idealistic  prime  motive  made 
us  join  hearts  from  the  first  with  Great  Britain 
and  France,  kept  us  out  of  war  for  two  years 
and  a  half,  and  brought  us  in  on  that  April  of 
1917.  There  is  always  a  complex  of  motives 
behind  every  war,  but  there  is  also,  with  few 
exceptions,  a  primum  mobile,  and  with  us  it  was 
the  distrust,  the  fear,  the  hatred  that  were  the 
reactions  of  our  idealism  against  arbitrary  vio 
lence.  The  invasion  of  Belgium  settled  our 
will  for  Belgium  and  her  allies.  Our  distrust 
of  war,  especially  European  war,  as  a  means  by 
which  we  could  bring  about  justice  and  peace, 
kept  us  out  of  the  struggle  despite  clamorous, 
and  perhaps  far-sighted,  minorities.  Our  final 
conviction  that  violence  was  a  fire  loose  in  the 
world,  which  must  be  stamped  out,  drove  us 
from  easy  neutrality  into  war.  And  if  in  the 
last  of  these  three  stages  dread  of  the  future 
and  the  need  of  immediate  self-defense  had 

92 


AMERICAN  IDEALISM 

their  large  part,  they  did  no  more  than  sharpen 
the  angle  of  our  resolve.  Idealism  kept  us  out 
of  war,  and  idealism  drove  us  into  it. 

The  fume  and  spume  of  idealism  is  oratory, 
sermonizing,  talk  about  morality,  duty,  patriot 
ism,  rights,  and  noble  purposes.  All  such 
gushing  rhetoric  is  no  more  the  thing  itself  than 
foam  is  the  ocean.  But,  like  smoke,  there  is 
seldom  much  of  it  without  cause.  Men  and 
women  who  were  abroad  in  1918  must  reflect 
curiously  on  the,  shall  we  say,  wearisome  pre 
valence  of  the  moralistic,  idealistic  note  in 
American  speech  and  writing  in  contrast  to  its 
restraint  and  frequent  absence  in  France  and 
England.  When  an  Englishman  orated  upon 
the  war  to  stop  war  he  was  usually  talking  for 
American  consumption.  This  does  not  mean 
that  Great  Britain  and  France  were  sordid,  we 
sincere ;  on  the  contrary,  it  is  proof  of  a  tinct 
ure  of  the  sentimental  in  our  idealism,  to  which 
I  shall  later  return.  But  it  is  additional  testi 
mony  to  the  quantity  and  the  popularity  of 

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EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

American  idealism  in  those  months.  The  tone 
of  the  press  at  that  crucial  time  was  evidence 
of  the  tone  of  the  people  that  read  and  re 
sponded.  And  while  many  a  sounding  speech 
and  impassioned  editorial  are  now,  as  one  reads 
them,  a  little  faded,  faintly  absurd,  like  tattered 
war  posters  on  a  rural  billboard,  yet  no  one 
can  doubt  the  flood  of  patriotic  idealism  that 
created  them,  few  will  doubt  that  our  war  ideal 
ism  was  a  virtue  in  1914-1918. 

It  seemed  a  virtue  then,  but  was  it  not  al 
ready  diseased?  When  we  entered  the  war, 
the  vast  majority  of  Americans  publicly  and 
privately  committed  themselves  to  certain  gen 
eral  principles,  and,  whatever  else  they  fought 
for,  believed  that  they  were  fighting  for  them. 
A  square  deal  all  around  was  one,  the  consent 
of  the  governed  to  their  government  was  an 
other,  a  third  was  the  substitution,  at  all  costs, 
of  justice  for  violence  in  the  ruling  of  the 
world.  We  all  assented  to  these  principles, 
most  of  us  assumed  them  voluntarily  as  an 

94 


AMERICAN  IDEALISM 

article  of  faith,  and  the  average  man  took  them 
as  seriously  as  he  is  able  to  take  abstractions. 
Peace  came,  the  armistice,  the  stages  of  the 
treaty.  Nothing  could  be  clearer  or  more  to  be 
expected  than  that  sometimes  in  spirit,  often  in 
detail,  and  most  seriously  in  ultimate  purpose, 
the  treaty  in  scores  of  instances  ran  counter  to 
the  faiths  we  had  accepted  and  made  common 
places  of  speech  and  thinking. 

I  am  neither  criticizing  nor  justifying  the 
treaty  and  its  included  covenant.  No  one,  I 
suppose,  but  a  sentimental  optimist  could  have 
expected  a  work  of  logical  art  in  exact  con 
formity  with  the  principles  and  conditions  of  a 
new  epoch  that  has  scarcely  begun,  no  one  at 
least  who  had  ever  read  history,  or  studied  the 
politics  of  Sonnino,  Clemenceau,  and  the 
Unionist  party.  It  was  bound  to  have  incon 
sistencies;  to  reflect  as  many  views  as  there 
were  strong  minds  in  the  conference,  to  be  ex 
perimental,  to  be  a  compromise.  This  is  not 
what  is  astonishing;  it  is  the  attitude  of  the 

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EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

typical  American  mind  toward  the  treaty  ne 
gotiations. 

In  the  winter  and  spring  of  1919,  while  the 
world  was  burning,  while  the  principles  we  had 
shouted  for  were  at  last  in  actual  settlement, 
this  enormous  American  idealism  slept,  forgot 
its  fine  phrases,  forgot  its  pledges  to  see  the 
thing  through,  was  bored  because  some  Amer 
icans  felt  that  it  was  our  duty  to  see  the  thing 
through.  We  are  an  uncritical  nation  despite 
our  occasional  vehemence  of  criticism,  but  we 
have  never  been  so  uncritical  of  major  issues  as 
in  1919,  when  the  terms  of  world  settlement 
were  of  acute  interest  to  all  but  Americans. 
We  are  an  easy-going  nation,  but  we  have 
never  been  so  easy-going  as  in  1919,  when  not 
one  man  in  a  thousand  as  much  as  read  the  ab 
stract  of  the  treaty  to  see  whether  the  things 
he  had  said  he  fought  for  were  safeguarded  in 
it.  The  only  real  fire-spitting  fervor  struck 
out  in  this  country  since  the  armistice  has  been 
in  defense  of  our  right  to  let  Europe  stew  in 


AMERICAN  IDEALISM 

her  own  juice,  and  our  privilege  to  tell  general 
principles  to  go  hang.  And  this  is  an  emotion 
almost  too  narrow  to  be  attributed,  even  by 
the  generous  minded,  to  idealism. 

One  answers,  of  course,  that  such  a  decline 
from  overheated  virtue  into  indifTerentism  is 
only  human  nature  at  its  old  tricks,  the  collapse 
after  the  New  Year's  resolution,  the  weariness 
of  being  too  good,  symptoms,  in  short,  of  con 
tent  with  having  "licked  the  Hun,"  and  a  desire 
to  get  back  to  work.  And  the  reply  is,  of 
course  this  is  true.  But  Europe  is  not  thus 
functioning.  There  has  been  a  striking  con 
trast  in  the  years  since  the  war  between  British 
and  American  attitudes  toward  treaty  negotia 
tions.  In  England,  exhausted  by  war  as  we 
never  were,  deep  in  the  lassitude  of  rest  after 
struggle,  men  and  women  have  leaped  into  criti 
cism  and  defense  of  the  ideals  embodied  in  the 
settlement.  Peace  has  seemed  to  them  as  vital 
a  battle-ground  of  ideas  as  war.  By  and  large, 
the  plodding  mass  of  us  who  make  money  and 

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EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

public  opinion  have  been  cold  to  the  contest,  un 
interested.  The  press  of  Great  Britain  has 
fiercely  attacked  and  fiercely  defended  the  mo 
rale  of  the  treaty;  ours  has  reported  it  with 
little  real  criticism  and  little  interest  except 
where  the  league  was  concerned.  Their  uni 
versities  have  supplied  men  and  parties  to  fight 
through  the  principles  for  which  we  fought; 
ours  have  been  intent  upon  how  much  scholastic 
credit  should  be  given  returned  soldiers  and 
who  should  get  an  honorary  degree.  They 
forced  an  easy-going  premier  to  stand  for  a 
victory  that  was  more  than  conquest;  we 
grudged  our  President  the  attempt  to  carry 
through  in  Paris  what  in  1917  we  were  all 
agreed  upon;  let  our  dislike  of  his  methods 
outweigh  our  deep  interest  in  his  ends.  If  it 
had  not  been  for  the  great  issue  of  the  League 
of  Nations,  which,  forcing  Americans  to  act, 
forced  them  to  remember  (some  with  difficulty) 
what  they  had  believed  in  and  what  they  had 
learned  in  1917  of  the  dangers  of  selfish  aloof- 


AMERICAN  IDEALISM 

ness  from  world  problems,  if  it  had  not  been  for 
the  fight  over  the  league,  the  politics  of  1919 
would  have  been  as  local,  as  trivial,  as  weari 
some,  as  in  the  year  after  a  Presidential  elec 
tion.  Some  scholar  in  the  next  decade  will 
place  side  by  side  the  files  of  a  New  York  daily 
in  its  moral-idealistic  stage  of  1917  and  its 
cynical  back-to-business  mood  of  1919;  will 
compare  the  fantastic  pledges  never  again  to 
trade  with  Germany,  which  were  circulating 
in  1918,  with  the  export  statistics  of  1919;  will 
marvel,  and  perhaps  draw  conclusions. 

And  one  wonders,  meeting  everywhere  an 
interest  in  world  affairs  that  seems  dying,  a 
national  morale  that  is  forgetting  its  moral 
impulses,  a  hatred  of  the  professional  idealist, 
a  weariness  of  general  principles,  and  a  cynical 
distrust  of  ideas — one  wonders  whether  this 
flaming  American  idealism  so-called  was  not 
even  in  1918  flushed  with  disease,  a  virtue  al 
ready  dying. 

Were  we  indeed  ever  really  idealistic  ?     Con- 

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EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

sider  the  case  of  the  ablest  of  our  manufac 
turers,  who,  when  the  emotional  fit  was  on  him, 
proposed  to  increase  the  production  of  idealism 
until  every  American  home  should  own  an  ideal 
of  the  latest  model.  He  gives  the  order,  draws 
the  checks,  and,  naively  surprised  at  the  dis 
covery  that  you  cannot  make  ideals  without 
understanding  them,  hangs  up  philosophy,  and 
goes  back  to  the  motor  business.  Consider 
the  case  of  our  radical  papers  who  fought  our 
entrance  into  a  war  where  American  ideals 
were  not  properly  safeguarded,  and  then  pre 
ferred  to  risk  a  treaty  without  the  League  of 
Nations,  to  a  league  which,  though  it  expressed 
American  idealism,  was  not  perfect  by  their 
judging.  Consider  the  flaming  desire  to  make 
the  universe  and  one's  home  safe  for  democ 
racy,  in  contrast  with  the  current  contempt  for 
the  ideals  of  industrial  democracy.  Perforce 
one  wonders  whether  American  idealism, 
healthy  or  diseased,  is  not  a  mere  emotion, 
easily  roused,  never  lasting;  whether,  as  a  val- 

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AMERICAN  IDEALISM 

uable  part  of  our  national  character,  it  is  not 
an  illusion. 

So  much  needs  to  be  said  by  way  of  charge 
and  speculation  in  order  to  clear  the  air.  If  I 
write  with  some  excitement,  it  is  no  more  than 
the  sight  of  the  tumble  from  great-worded, 
great  deeded  1918  to  the  indifferent,  self- 
regarding,  and  a  little  cynical  present  may  ac 
count  for.  Certainly  in  our  national  past  ideal 
ism  has  not  been  an  illusion,  although  it  was 
often  emotional.  Nor,  in  sober  fact,  do  I  doubt 
the  essential  idealism  of  the  normal  American 
mind,  especially  that  American  mind  which  in 
herits  the  optimism  and  the  liberal  instincts  of 
our  forefathers.  I  am  merely  curious  as  to  the 
exact  nature  of  that  idealism  as  it  exists,  and 
plays  strange  tricks,  to-day.  It  seems  to  be 
a  quality  more  resembling  energy  than  a  moral 
characteristic  like  virtue  or  vice.  It  seems,  as 
one  thinks  over  these  recent  manifestations,  to 
be  a  blend  of  physical  virility  and  nervous  sen 
sitiveness,  good  or  bad,  active  or  inactive,  ac- 

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EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

cording  to  the  condition  and  environment  of 
the  patient.  Stir  him,  and  it  becomes  active, 
beneficent,  altruistic.  Stir  him  further,  and  it 
may  become  sentimental,  with  symptoms  of 
hysteria.  Relax  the  pressure,  and  it  drops  into 
desuetude.  These  are  the  habits  of  American 
idealism,  and  I  doubt  whether  more  can  be  said 
of  them  except  by  way  of  further  descrip 
tion.  But  there  must  be  some  thoughts,  some 
ideas  behind  to  account  for  these  vagaries. 
There  must  be  reasons  why  Americans  idealize 
more  readily  than  other  nations,  and  why,  just 
now  at  least,  they  so  easily  tire  of  their  ideal 
izing. 

Neither  the  scope  of  these  pages  nor  my 
knowledge  permits  me  to  trace  the  history  of 
American  thinking  and  feeling,  to  say,  as  the 
historians  some  day  must,  what  elements  came 
from  Europe,  what  modifications  are  due  to 
pioneer  environment,  racial  mixture,  and  cen 
turies  of  unchecked  material  development. 
But  tentatively,  and  with  all  modesty,  one  may 

1 02 


AMERICAN  IDEALISM 

at  least  seek  for  light.  I  find  that  two  great 
figures  of  our  national  youth  and  the  ways  of 
thinking  they  represented  most  help  me  to  un 
derstand  the  strengths  and  the  weaknesses  of 
American  idealism,  help  to  an  understanding 
of  the  phenomena  of  1917-20. 

The  first  is  Jonathan  Edwards,  theologian  of 
international  importance,  leader  of  the  great 
spiritual  revival  of  mid-eighteenth  century  New 
England,  missionary  to  the  Indians,  president 
of  Princeton,  author  of  works  so  widely  read 
that  even  now  no  farm-house  garret  in  New 
England  but  will  yield  a  sermon  or  two,  a 
treatise  on  original  sin,  or  his  epochal  essay 
on  the  freedom  of  the  will. 

Alas  for  human  reputation!  This  tireless 
thinker,  whose  logic  built  up  in  entirety  an 
impregnable  argument  worthy  of  Aquinas,  is 
now  chiefly  remembered  as  a  preacher  of  infant 
damnation  and  a  thunderer  of  hell-fire  over 
frightened  Northampton  congregations.  But, 
as  all  wiser  critics  know,  the  influence  of  a 

103 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

great  mind  is  distinct  and  often  different  from 
its  reputation.  What  it  does,  works  on  and 
on  after  death,  transmuting,  transforming; 
what  it  was  in  popular  repute,  soon  becomes 
legend  and  supposed  historical  fact.  Compare 
the  reputation  of  Machiavelli  with  his  achieve 
ments  and  influence  as  described  in  Macaulay's 
famous  essay. 

In  actual  achievement  Edwards,  whose  mind 
was  of  unusual  lucidity  and  endurance,  crys 
tallized  for  Americans  the  Calvinistic  ethics  of 
life  which  were  the  backbone  of  Puritan  civili 
zation.  Man,  by  the  unarguable  might  of  God, 
is  born  with  a  will  whose  nature  may  be  either 
bad  or  good.  Henceforth  his  reason  is  free, 
his  choice  is  free,  within  the  limits  that  his  char 
acter  permits.  It  becomes  therefore  supremely 
important  that  he  shall  choose  and  reason  virtu 
ously,  for  there  is  no  way  to  be  sure  that  he 
has  a  good  will,  that  he  is  among  the  "elect" 
except  by  virtuous  action  leading  to  a  sense  of 
salvation.  Thus  in  every  condition  of  life, 

104 


AMERICAN  IDEALISM 

without  excuse  or  palliation,  the  Christian  must 
daily,  hourly  strive  to  prove  that  he  is  one  of 
the  elect  of  God,  saved  from  hell-fire  by  the 
character  God  has  given  him.  Good  intentions 
count  for  nothing.  Good  works,  if  unaccom 
panied  by  the  sense  of  spiritual  salvation,  count 
for  nothing.  God,  Himself  blameless,  has 
willed  sin  and  sinful  men.  It  is  for  us  to 
prove  that  we  are  not  among  the  damned. 

That  the  system  is  incredible  most  moderns 
now  believe ;  that  it  is  logical,  more  logical  per 
haps  than  any  later  attempt  to  justify  the  ways 
of  God  to  man,  the  student  must  admit.  My 
desire  is  naturally  not  to  argue,  but  to  em 
phasize,  what  can  never  be  too  much  em 
phasized,  the  effect  of  such  thinking  upon  the 
intellectual  life  of  America.  It  was  believed 
in  powerfully  and  well  understood  by  perhaps 
a  majority  of  one  formative  generation.  Later 
it  was  not  believed  in  so  powerfully,  and  it  was 
but  little  understood,  especially  outside  of  New 
England.  But  a  conviction  of  the  infinite  ne- 

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EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

cessity  of  willing  the  right  became  a  mental 
habit  in  American  morality  that  persists  and 
becomes  a  trait  and  a  chief  factor,  as  any  reader 
may  see,  in  so-called  American  idealism. 

Benjamin  Franklin  was  almost  the  exact  con 
temporary  of  Jonathan  Edwards,  but  he  had 
the  inestimable  advantage  of  living  longer  and 
seeing  more;  two  continents  and  two  ages,  in 
fact,  were  his  familiars,  and  learned  from  him 
as  well  as  taught  him.  Franklin,  it  is  clear, 
was  strongly  influenced  by  that  French  eigh 
teenth  century  which  he  loved,  with  its  praise 
of  reason  and  its  trust  in  common  sense.  But 
he  was  even  more  a  product  of  the  new  Amer 
ica.  America,  as  Edwards  and  Cotton  Mather 
saw  it,  was  an  experiment  in  godliness.  When 
the  Puritan  scheme  should  have  proved  its 
efficacy  by  an  abnormal  increase  in  the  number 
of  earthly  saints,  the  colonies  would  have  served 
their  chief  end,  and  would,  so  Mather  thought, 
decline.  The  hell-breathing  vehemence  of  Ed 
wards  was  chiefly  due  to  his  fear  that  the 

1 06 


AMERICAN  IDEALISM 

scheme  was  failing.     He  was  fighting  a  spirit 
ual  decline. 

But  F~anklin  was  a  member  of  the  worldly, 
not  the  spiritual,  body  of  America;  he  was  a 
citizen  of  a  country  visibly  growing  in  wealth 
and  population.  He  looked  outward,  not  in 
ward;  forward,  not  backward.  Like  Edwards, 
he  hated  sin;  but  sin  for  him  was  not  sin  be 
cause  it  was  forbidden,  but  forbidden  because 
it  was  sin.  Franklin's  was  a  practical  moral 
ity,  which  was  cut  to  fit  life,  not  to  compress 
it.  His  firm  character  and  the  clarity  of  his 
reason  kept  his  morals  high.  His  ethics  were 
admirable,  but  they  were  based  upon  the  prin 
ciple  that  honesty  is  the  best  policy,  not  upon 
the  fear  of  God.  To  be  "reasonable"  was  his 
highest  good.  "So  convenient  it  is  to  be  a  rea 
sonable  creature,"  he  remarks  whimsically, 
"since  it  enables  one  to  find  or  make  a  reason 
for  everything  one  has  a  mind  to  do."  As  long 
as  one  is  a  Franklin,  with  the  will  to  virtue, 
honesty,  industry,  and  thrift  that  is  bred  from 

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EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

a  good  inheritance,  in  a  new  and  developing 
country,  such  ethics  make  for  idealism.  No 
one  was  more  idealistic  in  his  day  than  the 
practical  Franklin,  who  wished  to  form  a  league 
of  virtue  of  all  nations  to  be  governed  by  rules, 
and  supported  by  the  reason  of  virtuous  man 
kind. 

And  here  is  another  palpable  strain  of  Amer 
icanism,  differing  from  that  necessity  which 
Edwards  trumpeted,  but,  like  it,  a  stiffener  of 
idealistic  impulses.  Here  one  places  the  love 
of  a  square  deal,  the  desire  to  do  what  is  right 
because  it  is  "fair,"  the  sense  of  the  reasonable 
ness  of  justice  that  freed  the  slaves,  gave  Cuba 
self-government,  determined  our  policy  toward 
the  Philippines,  and  was  horror-struck  by  the 
invasion  of  Belgium.  It  is  the  idealism  of 
good  common  sense,  and  together  with  the 
mental  habit  of  willing  the  right  has  been  a 
main  cause  of  American  idealism. 

Both  of  these  American  characteristics  are 
operative  to-day.  Both  are  now  factors  and 

108 


AMERICAN  IDEALISM 

dangerous  factors  in  our  idealism,  for  the 
strong  will  of  the  Calvinists  to  do  right  has 
become  erratic  and  perverted,  and  the  common 
sense  of  Franklin's  school  has  degenerated. 
Here,  as  I  shall  endeavor  to  show,  are  two  chief 
causes  for  the  vagaries  of  the  American  mind 
in  the  years  that  ended  the  war. 

The  mental  discipline  which  the  Puritans 
learned  from  the  fear  of  a  wrathful  God  re 
mained  a  discipline  long  after  it  had  lost  its 
theological  basis,  and  is  responsible  in  no  small 
measure  for  the  disciplined  will  of  nineteenth- 
century  America  to  succeed  in  material  en 
deavors  as  well  as  in  philanthropic  or  moral 
purpose.  But,  divorced  from  the  belief  in  a 
speedy  damnation  which  had  given  it  cause, 
it  was  bound  to  become,  and  it  did  become,  a 
mere  mental  habit,  a  kind  of  aimless  necessity 
of  being  virtuous.  Bolted  no  longer  to  a  belief 
in  a  revengeful  God  who  demanded  virtue, 
loosed,  like  an  engine  from  its  flywheel,  this 
ancestral  sense  of  necessity  whirled  on  by  its 

109 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

own  momentum.  It  became  will  without  think 
ing  behind  it,  which  was  driven  by  material 
circumstance  instead  of  religious  belief.  It  be 
came  a  restless  energy  whose  aim,  as  a  foreign 
observer  has  said,  seemed  to  be  "mere  accelera 
tion."  It  became  unreasonable,  often  absurd, 
sometimes  hysterical.  I  find  its  manifestations 
in  the  insistence  that  America  must  always  be 
described  as  sweet,  lovely,  and  virtuous  in  dis 
regard  of  the  facts,  in  our  "boosting"  of  pros 
perity  and  success  by  proclaiming  them.  I  find 
them  in  the  determination  to  be  good  and  happy 
and  prosperous  immediately  and  without  re 
gard  to  circumstance  which  has  created  the 
American  magazine  story  and  brought  about 
national  prohibition  by  constitutional  amend 
ment.  This  hand-me-down  will  is  responsible 
for  much  progress,  good  and  bad,  in  America ; 
it  is  also  responsible  for  American  sentimen- 
talism.  It  has  been  a  driving  force  in  our 
idealism ;  but  because  it  is  not  so  much  reasoned 
purpose  as  a  mental  habit  inherited,  it  has  run 

no 


AMERICAN  IDEALISM 

wild,  become  hysterical  and  erratic.  It  led  us 
to  propose  to  reform  the  world  and  to  adver 
tise  our  intention  before  our  brains  were  ready 
for  the  task.  It  makes  our  idealism  feverish 
and  uncertain. 

As  for  Franklin's  rule  of  common  sense,  it 
has  become  a  positive  deterrent  to  idealism. 
His  idea  of  conduct  reasonably  shaped  accord 
ing  to  the  needs  of  environment  was,  and  is 
to-day,  the  most  solid  trait  of  Americans.  It 
is  the  ethics  of  modern  business,  and  American 
business  has  become,  and  for  a  little  while  yet 
will  remain,  the  fundamental  America.  Nev 
ertheless,  every  candid  observer  will  admit,  no 
matter  how  great  his  faith  in  the  future  of  his 
country,  that  the  reasonable  good  sense  of  the 
Franklin  tradition  suffered  a  progressive  dilu 
tion  or  degeneration  throughout  the  nineteenth 
century.  Rational  ethics  became  for  the  most 
of  us  materialistic  rationalism,  still  reasonable, 
still  ethical  in  its  way,  still  backed  and  re 
strained  by  common  sense  (our  profiteers  have 

in 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

also  been  philanthropists),  but  an  enemy, 
nevertheless,  to  all  idealism .  that  could  not  be 
made  from  steel,  brick,  rubber,  or  oil.  We 
have  been  too  reasonable  to  be  sordid;  too  ma 
terialistic  to  remain  in  the  best  sense  reason 
able.  Far  from  advocating  a  league  of  the 
virtues,  our  business  common  sense  has  been 
fighting  a  League  of  Nations.  The  contrast 
between  our  moral  code  and  our  business  code 
has  already  been  overwritten  in  muck-raking 
literature.  Nevertheless,  despite  exaggeration, 
it  exists.  Our  national  life  is  dual.  We  can 
stand  on  our  moral  foot  and  our  business  foot, 
but  usually  we  alternate.  In  1918  we  rested 
entirely  on  one;  in  1919  we  swung  with  relief 
to  the  other.  Franklin's  rule  of  common  sense 
as  a  stimulus  to  idealism  has  broken  down. 

What  reasonable  sense  of  proportion  I  my 
self  possess  as  a  descendant  of  the  compatriots 
of  Franklin  urges  me  to  protest  instantly  that 
all  this  is  not  to  be  taken  as  a  picture  of  con 
temporary  America.  Rather  it  is  a  plucking 

112 


AMERICAN  IDEALISM 

out  merely  of  two  strains  of  experience  that 
all  must  recognize.  But  these  are  perilously 
interwoven  in  our  national  character.  They 
affect  the  validity  of  our  idealism. 

The  hysterical  will  drives  us  into  professions 
of  virtue  we  cannot  make  good.  It  drove  us 
to  "boost"  the  war;  and  then,  being  a  restless 
energy  sprung  from  habit  rather  than  from 
conviction,  left  us  exhausted  in  spirit  and  cyni 
cal  in  mind  when  the  moral  profits  were  ready 
for  the  gathering.  It  stirred  a  passion  for  the 
League  of  Nations,  rights  of  small  countries, 
democracy,  justice,  and  the  rest,  and  then  col 
lapsed  like  the  second  day  of  "clean-up"  week. 
It  set  the  will  going  and  left  the  brain  unmoved. 

And  our  common  sense,  diluted  through  mil 
lions,  obsessed  by  the  problems  of  manufacture 
and  construction,  is  in  ever  greater  danger  of 
losing  that  basis  of  character  and  enlightened 
reason  that  alone  can  make  common  sense  any 
thing  but  common.  It  dreads  ideas,  distrusts 
theories,  is  made  uncomfortable  by  altruism 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

that  extends  beyond  the  home.  As  a  nation, 
we  have  not  degenerated,  for  our  virile  energy, 
our  will,  our  adaptiveness  are  all  as  strong  as 
ever,  stronger  perhaps  than  elsewhere  in  the 
world.  But,  as  compared  with  Franklin's,  our 
common  sense  has  lost  character.  It  pulled 
back  in  the  great  moral  and  intellectual  prob 
lems  of  the  war;  it  did  not  lead.  As  mani 
fested  in  the  present  struggle  over  international 
policies,  it  falls  below  the  ethical  standards  of 
the  nation,  whether  you  tap  it  in  clubs  and 
offices  or  in  Congress.  In  a  time  of  crisis  it 
rallies  to  encounter  material  problems  and  is 
invaluable;  but  morally  and  intellectually  its 
vision  is  short,  its  endurance  weak, 

The  trouble  with  the  American  reformer,  as 
has  often  been  said,  is  that  he  has  more  energy 
than  reason ;  and  this  is  because  he  incarnates 
the  instinctive,  irrational  will  of  which  I  have 
been  writing.  The  trouble  with  the  American 
materialist  is  that  he  has  kept  his  common  sense 
while  losing  his  vision. 

114 


AMERICAN  IDEALISM 

Both,  in  short,  lack  an  adequate  spiritual  and 
moral  basis ;  and  so  does  the  American  idealism 
that  is  functioning  nobly,  but  so  irregularly, 
to-day.  With  an  irresponsible  will  driving  it 
forward  and  a  matter-of-fact  common  sense 
holding  it  back,  it  suffers  too  frequently  from 
the  weakness  of  all  qualities  that  spring  from 
custom  rather  than  from  conviction.  Its  leaf 
age  has  spread;  its  roots  have  contracted. 

I  am  not  so  unhumorous  as  to  propose  that 
the  remedy  is  once  again  to  believe  in  Jonathan 
Edwards's  God  and  infant  damnation;  but  we 
must  go  deeper  than  habit  and  tradition  for 
the  springs  of  our  action.  Not  since  the  Civil 
War  have  we  as  a  nation  explored  our  souls, 
sought  the  channels  of  our  being,  tested  our 
ultimate  faith.  This  war  has  been  no  test.  Its 
issues  were  clear.  They  appealed  to  principles 
that  we  held  firmly  because  we  had  inherited 
them.  It  was  easier  to  go  in  than  to  stay  out. 
Even  our  material  prosperity,  apparently, 
stood  to  gain,  not  to  lose,  by  entering  the  con- 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

flict.  We  made  the  right  choice,  but  it  was 
not  hard  to  make  it.  To  be  idealistic  was  easy. 

I  do  not  believe  that  our  inheritance  either 
of  virtuous  will  or  of  practical  common  sense 
will  serve  us  long  without  renewal.  The  first 
is  vehement  in  propaganda,  prohibition,  and 
hysteric  excess,  but  flags  when  a  load  of  stern 
duty,  national  or  international,  is  put  upon  it. 
The  second  has  no  end  and  aim  but  the  making 
of  a  prosperous  America  where  the  grubber 
and  the  grabber  have  much  and  others  little. 
It  is  useful,  nay,  indispensable,  to  the  economic 
state,  but  beyond  economics — and  so  much  is 
beyond  economics ! — there  is  little  health  in  it. 
If  our  idealism  is  to  remain  as  robust  as  our 
material  prosperity,  it  must  gain  what  Franklin 
would  have  described  as  a  basis  of  enlightened 
reason,  or  suffer  what  Edwards  would  have 
called  a  conversion — and,  preferably,  both. 

Samuel's  mother  was  a  fine,  but  somewhat 
rigorous,  woman  who  brought  him  up  in  the 
conviction  that  he  had  to  do  right  (by  which 

116 


AMERICAN  IDEALISM 

she  meant  'being  honest  and  moral,  and  going 
to  church  on  Sundays)  or  shame  would  come 
upon  him.  His  father  was  a  man  whose  "word 
was  as  good  as  his  bond."  He  taught  his  boy 
that  working  hard  and  saving  money  were  prob 
ably  the  most  important  things  in  life,  and  that 
if  you  paid  your  bills,  were  true  to  your  word, 
and  kept  an  eye  upon  shifty  neighbors,  you  were 
sure  to  be  happy  and  successful. 

At  the  age  of  fifty  the  father  died  from 
hardening  of  the  arteries,  the  result  of  too  few 
vacations,  and  the  fnother  became  a  rather 
morose  member  of  the  W.  C.  T.  U.  Samuel 
found  himself  now  possessed  of  half  a  million 
dollars  and  a  prosperous  shoe  factory. 

As  for  the  factory,  he  discovered  within  a 
year  that  since  the  death  of  his  father  its  suc 
cess  had  been  due  to  a  new  system  of  piece 
work,  which  "speeded  up"  the  worker  and  gave 
the  profits  to  the  proprietor.  But  there  seemed 
no  way  of  changing  the  system  without  ruin 
ing  the  business.  As  for  his  wealth,  it  brought 

117 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

him  new  and  pleasing  associates  who  were  more 
polished  and  intelligent  than  he,  and  whose  life 
was  so  much  more  cheerful,  instructive,  and 
interesting  than  his  early  experience  that  he 
could  only  wish  to  be  like  them ;  especially  when 
he  saw  that  they  were  far  better  citizens  than 
his  father,  who,  to  tell  the  truth,  lived  very 
much  for  his  own  narrow  interests.  And  yet 
their  ideas  of  pleasure  and  even  of  morality 
were  quite  different  from  what  he  had  been  led 
to  suppose  were  the  only  proper  principles  on 
which  to  conduct  one's  life,  and  they  never 
went  to  church.  He  wanted  to  'be  honest,  he 
wanted  to  be  good ;  but  neither  how  to  be  honest 
in  his  factory  nor  how  to  be  good  and  yet  a 
"good  fellow"  were  explained  by  the  teachings 
of  his  youth. 

For  an  unhappy  year  or  two  he  tried  to  act 
like  his  father,  believe  as  his  mother,  and  be 
like  his  neighbors.  In  addition,  in  order  to 
satisfy  a  somewhat  uneasy  conscience,  he  pre 
pared  to  enter  politics  on  a  platform  of  straight 

118 


AMERICAN  IDEALISM 

Americanism  and  the  full  dinner-pail.  Then 
in  one  eventful  week  his  workmen  struck  for 
an  eight-hour  day  and  shop  committees,  his 
mother  announced  her  intention  of  bequeathing 
her  share  of  the  estate  to  the  Anti-tobacco 
League,  his  best  girl  refused  to  marry  him  un 
less  he  should  become  an  Episcopalian,  and 
he  was  invited  by  the  local  boss  to  subscribe 
to  a  "slush"  fund  or  give  up  politics. 

Samuel  went  to  the  Maine  woods  to  catch 
trout  and  think  over  the  situation.  What  he 
did  finally  is  not  told  in  the  story.  What  he 
decided  is,  however,  of  some  significance.  For, 
brooding  over  a  dark  pool  in  the  spruces,  he 
concluded  that  each  generation  must  search  out 
the  foundations  for  its  own  morality,  and  de 
termine  for  itself  the  worth  and  power  of  the 
ideals  it  proclaims.  And  so  perhaps  will 
America. 


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CHAPTER  V 

RELIGION    IN   AMERICA 

THE  rarest  experience  in  America  is  a 
discussion  of  morals.  You  can  hear 
morals  preached  about,  but  that  is  not  a  discus 
sion.  You  can  read  about  morals  in  arguments 
disguised  as  essays,  but  these  seldom  cause  dis 
cussion.  Fully  a  third  of  successful  American 
plays  and  stories  turn  upon  a  moral  axiom,  but 
one  that  we  accept  without  argument,  like  rain 
in  April  and  the  August  drouth.  One  hears 
very  little  real  discussion  of  moral  questions 
here  because  "old  Americans,"  at  least,  agree 
in  their  moral  standards  as  remarkably  as  did 
the  Victorians. 

In  this  respect  we  are,  indeed,  still  Victorians, 

Though  in  others  already  a  century  beyond  them. 

Some  of  us  may  (or  did)  get  drunk,  but  we 

1 20 


RELIGION  IN  AMERICA 

do  not  believe  in  hard  drinking;  not  even  the 
saloon-keepers  believed  in  hard  drinking. 
Some  of  us  make  license  of  our  liberty  in  sex 
relations ;  but  the  public  disapproval  of  promis 
cuity  is,  to  fall  into  the  current  phrase,  nation 
wide.  Some  of  us  steal  in  a  large  and  generous 
fashion,  taking  from  him  who  hath  not  business 
ability  for  the  benefit  of  him  who  hath  shrewd 
ness  and  its  fruits.  But  if  these  actions  can 
be  described  in  terms  of  theft  or  misappropria 
tion,  every  one  will  agree  that  they  are  wicked, 
even  stock-holders  and  profiteers.  You  cannot 
get  up  a  decent  argument  on  moral  questions  in 
America,  because,  as  with  small  boys  in  war 
time,  no  one  will  take  the  unpopular  side.  The 
ethics  of  America  are  as  definite  as  a  code. 

This  accepted  and  not  unlofty  moral  code, 
with  its  extension  to  justice  and  the  rights  of 
individuals,  is  the  force  behind  our  idealism 
that  has  made  it  an  international  factor  to  be 
reckoned  with  from  the  days  of  Jeffersonian 
ideology  to  our  own.  Like  the  dissenters' 

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EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

vote  in  England,  it  is  a  dangerous  force  to 
oppose.  Despite  occasional  hysteria  and  sen- 
timentalism,  despite  its  frequent  betrayals  by 
an  unlovely  common  sense,  it  is  strong  because 
it  has  the  momentum  of  tradition  and  the 
tenacity  of  prejudice.  Of  its  worth  I  am 
American  enough  to  be  convinced.  Of  its  in 
telligence  one  cannot  be  so  certain.  But  what 
really  concerns  all  lovers  of  our  hard-built 
civilization  is  how  durable  under  stress  is  this 
moral  idealism,  under  such  stress  as  the  ap 
proaching  change  in  our  social  order  is  sure  to 
bring  to  morals  and  morale,  as  well  as  to  rail 
road  stocks  and  the  Constitution. 

Indeed,  the  inner  fire,  the  spirit,  is  not  easily 
discoverable  in  this  American  idealism  with  its 
moral  causes.  Historically,  it  is  easy  to  ex 
plain  it;  habit  has  carried  it  on,  and  common 
sense  must  usually  approve  a  moral  investment 
that  has  been  profitable;  but,  nevertheless,  it  is 
hard  to  see  a  continuing  raison  d'etre  for  such 
idealism  in  America.  It  seems,  as  I  have  sug- 

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RELIGION  IN  AMERICA 

gested  in  an  earlier  chapter,  to  lack  a  definable 
spiritual  basis.  Its  persistence,  its  weaknesses, 
its  dangers,  raise  constantly  the  question  as  to 
the  status  of  religion  in  America. 

I  remember  hearing  Graham  Wallas — who 
will  not  be  suspected  of  bias  in  this  matter 
— remark  that  England  would  not  pass  out  of 
clouds  and  darkness  until  she  had  made  for 
herself  a  new  and  felt  interpretation  of  religion. 
America,  founded  by  a  curious  partnership  of 
the  religious  instinct  and  economic  need  and 
brought  up  on  the  moral  and  material  profits 
of  the  union,  cannot  be  supposed  to  be  less  in 
need  of  a  fundamental  spiritual  readjustment. 
Every  socialist  and  communist,  every  corpora 
tion  president  and  ex-Secretary,  every  profes 
sional  intellectual  and  amateur  prophet,  is  de 
claring  his  mind  on  the  one  thing  needful  to 
save  the  world  and  America.  I  do  not  know 
why  we,  whose  profession  it  is  to  teach,  whose 
duty  it  is  to  interpret  and  to  sympathize  with 
every  motion  of  the  American  mind,  should 

123 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

hesitate  to  speak  out  also  in  this  matter.  It  is, 
I  think,  demonstrable  that  America  needs  re 
ligion  as  much  as  steel  and  automobiles,  as 
much  as  a  better  distribution  of  wealth  and 
cheaper  bread  and  meat. 

The  status  of  religion  in  America  has  been 
as  peculiar  as  the  status  of  politics.  Our  re 
ligious  attitudes  have  been  profoundly  affected 
and  from  early  periods  by  the  separation  of 
church  and  state.  Struggle  against  a  vested 
institution,  dissent  from  traditional  power,  con 
ciliation  with  sacred  authority,  have  been  burn 
ing  points  in  the  modern  history  of  Europe. 
They  have  made  great  literature  in  England 
from  Shelley  through  Tennyson  and  Arnold 
and  Swinburne.  Our  first  battle  against  the 
tyrannical  in  tradition  wherever  found  was  won 
in  the  Revolution;  our  second,  in  the  defeat 
of  the  Federalist  party  in  1800. 

In  those  contests  we  were  freed,  perhaps  too 
early  and  too  easily,  from  the  menace  of  the 
church  as  a  function  of  government.  Since 

124 


RELIGION  IN  AMERICA 

then  we  have  been,  and  we  still  are,  freer  than 
the  European  to  seek  religion  wherever  it  may 
be  found.  Our  great  religious  literature  is 
creative,  not  protestant.  Woolman  of  the 
Quakers  was  a  seeker;  Emerson,  in  greater 
measure,  was  a  seeker,  seeking  spirituality  for 
Americans,  and,  like  Woolman,  fanning  their 
moral  enthusiasms.  Hawthorne  and  Thoreau 
were  searchers  for  a  new  morality;  Whitman 
and  William  James,  in  their  fashion,  searchers 
also. 

Emerson  in  his  religious  attitude  belongs  a 
century  later  than  Matthew  Arnold.  Fed 
from  almost  identical  intellectual  sources,  he 
is  the  liberated  mind  seeking  new  allegiances, 
Arnold,  the  rebel  not  yet  free.  And  in  general 
American  religion,  without  reference  to  its 
quality,  has  had,  like  American  politics,  a  status 
some  generations  ahead  of  the  rest  of  the  world. 
Hamilton  and  Jefferson  and  Lincoln  were 
prophets  for  Europe.  The  independent  sects 
of  America,  none  established,  all  respectable, 

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EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

and  the  free  seekers  after  new  truth  which 
sprang  from  them,  seem  to  have  prefigured  a 
condition  that  is  common  in  a  world  growing 
democratic. 

In  truth,  we  old  Americans,  who  with  all 
our  faults  still  best  represent  America,  gained 
freedom  of  conscience  at  the  expense  of  shat 
tering  the  ideal  of  a  church  universal.  Re 
ligion  for  us  came  in  general  to  be  a  personal 
matter  because  the  church,  separated  from  the 
state,  lost  the  visible  authority  that  made  it 
easy — or  necessary — to  trust  to  an  institution 
the  responsibility  for  one's  soul.  We  felt,  as 
was  to  be  expected,  the  need  of  new  authority, 
new  sanctions  for  our  religion.  And  we  were 
free,  freer  than  others,  to  seek  and  to  find  a  re 
ligion  for  democracy.  What  has  been  the  re 
sult? 

The  results  in  bourgeois  America,  which 
goes  to  the  theater,  wears  the  commonly  ad 
vertised  collars,  sends  its  children  to  college, 
and  keeps  out  of  the  slums  and  the  police-court, 

126 


RELIGION  IN  AMERICA 

are  clearly  visible  and  highly  significant.  Four 
classes,  interlocking,  but  distinct  enough  for 
definition,  may  be  readily  described ;  and  though 
they  do  not  include  the  recent  immigrant  or  the 
fire-new  sophists  of  radicalism,  the  strongest 
brains,  the  most  characteristic  emotions,  and 
the  best  character  in  America  belong  there  with 
the  mass  of  the  mediocre  undistinguished  who 
are  public  opinion  and  the  ultimate  America. 

There  are,  first,  the  militant  advance-guards 
of  our  idealism,  the  ethical  enthusiasts  who 
carry  on  the  moral  fervor  of  America.  They 
range,  like  colors  of  the  spectrum,  from  the 
rarer  violet  of  the  philosophical  moralists,  in 
heritors  of  the  New  England  ethics  or  the  Vir 
ginia  ideology,  through  the  solid  blue  of  the 
organizers  of  great  movements  in  social  re 
form,  to  the  blatant  red  of  the  prohibitionists 
and  the  Anti-tobacco  League.  I  do  not  mean 
to  be  flippant.  The  irony,  if  there  is  irony,  is 
bred  of  the  sardonic  humor  aroused  by  so 
various  an  army  all  certain  that  by  stopping 

127 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

this  and  beginning  that  the  world  can  be  saved, 
It  is  their  certainty  that  makes  them  im 
pressive — the  same  certainty  which  drove  our 
colonials  toward  republican  government  and 
our  pioneers  to  the  conquest  of  a  wilderness. 
Sneers  at  their  banner,  "Progress,"  satisfy 
none  but  the  reactionary.  Progress  where? 
Who  knows.  Progress  for  whom?  It  is 
hard  to  tell.  But  only  the  man  who  hon 
estly  believes  in  civilization  for  the  benefit  of 
the  few  can  doubt  the  advance  that  has  been 
made.  I  should  have  preferred  the  twelfth 
century  to  the  twentieth  if  I  could  have  lived  in 
the  right  Benedictine  monastery  or  been  count 
in  Provence.  I  should  have  enjoyed  the  Eliza 
bethan  age  more  than  my  own  if  I  could  have 
voyaged — in  the  cabin — with  Raleigh,  been 
Shakespeare's  patron,  or  possessed  a  manor 
neither  too  near  nor  too  far  from  London.  I 
still  think  that  life  in  a  good  English  college, 
with  a  taste  for  letters  and  the  proper  port, 
is  superior  to  any  mental  or  physical  luxury 

128 


RELIGION  IN  AMERICA 

we  can  offer  in  America.  Yet  all  this  is  aside 
from  the  point.  Provengal  poetry  and  perfect 
social  intercourse,  high  adventure,  the  intellect 
ual  life  in  an  appropriate  physical  setting,  and 
even  good  port,  may  come  again  somewhere  on 
the  line  along  which  our  progress  is  marching. 
In  the  meantime,  though  the  war  has  been  a 
cooling  card  to  optimism,  the  ethical  enthusi 
asms  of  the  age  have  made  the  opportunities 
of  the  average  man  for  most  good  things  in 
life  better,  have  made  him,  in  the  most  accurate 
sense  of  the  word,  not  nobler,  but  more  civil 
ized,  and  particularly  in  America,  where  the 
fire  of  opportunity  was  first  set  burning. 

The  moral  enthusiasts  whose  religion  has 
been  transformed  into  ethical  idealism  are  safe 
from  ridicule.  Religious  persecution,  slavery, 
the  tyranny  of  disease  and  ignorance,  they  have 
already  reformed  out  of  the  brighter  parts  of 
the  world,  and  perhaps  alcoholism  and  poverty 
are  to  follow.  We  can  well  afford  to  risk  their 
mistakes  and  their  excesses,  their  blind  trust  in 

129 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

works,  so  long  as  they  are  propelled  by  a  sincere 
energy  of  will  to  make  the  world  better.  But 
what  lies  behind  this  will  ?  What  keeps  it  from 
decaying  ?  For  these  men  are  seldom  religious 
in  the  sense  that  their  reforming  zeal  springs 
from  a  deep  spiritual  need.  A  part  of  their 
energy  is  moral  habit ;  a  part  is  exactly  identical 
with  the  energy  that  builds  up  a  great  industrial 
plant  in  order  to  satisfy  a  craving  for  laudable 
action.  If  the  certainty  that  the  community 
must  be  bettered,  can  be  bettered,  should 
slacken,  where  would  it  find  revival  ?  In  faith, 
hope,  and  charity?  But  can  hope  endure  and 
charity  be  permanent  without  faith?  And 
what  is  their  faith? 

The  faith  of  our  moral  idealists  is  as  strong, 
I  suppose,  as  that  which  supported  the  Stoics 
or  the  clear-sighted  reformers  of  the  eighteenth 
century.  They  believe  in  the  perfectability  of 
man  and  the  pragmatic  value  of  right-doing. 
This,  for  a  strong  man,  may  be  enough;  but 
it  is  not  a  religion.  It  is  questionable  whether 

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RELIGION  IN  AMERICA 

it  would  stand  adversity.  It  was  not  shaken 
in  the  war,  but  it  is  shaking  now.  If  the  en 
thusiasm  of  the  reformers  should  be  spent  or 
exhausted,  they  would  have  little  to  fall  back 
upon.  Their  idealism  has  already  shown  signs 
of  hysteria,  spots  of  sentimentalism,  evidences 
of  a  basis  in  habit  and  impulse  as  much  as  in 
deep  spiritual  conviction. 

It  has  become  almost  a  commonplace  to  say 
that  the  spiritual  seekers,  the  second  of  our  ob 
servable  classes — more  numerous,  I  believe, 
in  America  than  elsewhere  in  the  white  world 
since  the  seventeenth  century — are  products 
of  reaction  against  the  dry  moral  will  that 
seeks  its  satisfaction  in  works,  not  faith.  Yet 
their  importance  has  not  always  been  grasped. 
Commercial  America  has  not  only  been  the 
home  of  the  greatest  of  modern  philanthropies, 
but  also  the  source  of  the  only  powerful  re 
ligious  sect  created  in  the  nineteenth  century, 
as  well  as  one  of  the  few  new  strains  in  ideal 
istic  philosophy.  They  are  not  happy  in  our 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

commercialism  or  content  with  ethical  reform, 
those  more  sensitive  spirits  whose  numbers  and 
weight  in  bourgeois  America  are  evident  when 
ever  an  emotional  crisis  arrives.  And  the  free 
dom  from  ecclesiastical  restraint  which  was 
won  for  them  by  their  ancestors  has  left  them 
free  to  construct  new  religions. 

But  as  it  was  the  earnestness  of  the  moral 
enthusiasts  that  seemed  more  valuable  than 
any  reason  they  had  for  goodness,  so  it  is  the 
spiritual  craving  of  American  seekers  that  is 
more  impressive  than  anything  they  have 
found.  I  do  not  undervalue  the  hopeful  ideal 
ism  of  Emerson  or  the  strong  protest  of  the 
Christian  Scientists  against  surrender  to  petty 
worry  and  pain.  Yet  in  so  far  as  we  may 
generalize  in  so  vast  a  matter,  the  seekers  of 
spirituality  have  been  singularly  out  of  har 
mony  with  the  needs  of  a  democracy.  They 
have  found  religions  that  solace  the  optimistic 
temperament  when  it  has  been  duly  intellect- 
ualized;  they  have  found  medicine  for  the  ills 

132 


RELIGION  IN  AMERICA 

of  prosperous  people;  but  the  breadth  and  often 
the  depth  of  appeal  that  must  characterize  a 
religion  for  all  men  they  have  missed  or  failed 
to  seek.  The  Friends,  later  called  Quakers, 
began  with  the  will  that  all  the  world  should 
become  Friends ;  it  was  only  in  later  stages  that 
they  regarded  themselves  as  a  peculiar  people 
with  whom  only  those  fitted  by  temperament 
should  join.  But  it  is  with  such  an  exclusive- 
ness  that  the  seekers  of  to-day  who  promulgate 
religion  commence.  One  can  prophesy  in  ad 
vance  who  will  or  will  not  be  Christian  Scien 
tists.  And  beyond  the  bounds  of  sects  the  spir 
itual  adventure  exhausts  itself  in  emotional 
vagaries,  or  rises  into  regions  of  pure  mys 
ticism  where,  no  matter  how  noble  or  how 
satisfying  it  may  be  for  individual  persons, 
we  shall  never  find  the  religion  for  a  democ 
racy. 

The  third  group  is  again  a  result  of  that 
early  freeing  of  America  from  ecclesiastical 
control ;  but  its  members  are  those  whom  such 

133 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

unchartered  freedom  tires.  The  reactionaries, 
if  I  may  call  them  by  that  name  without  offense 
intended,  are  the  lovers  of  tradition,  whose 
modern  craving  for  the  sanctions  of  religion 
leads  them  back  into  dependence  upon  the  old 
rites,  the  old  theologies,  the  old  authority, 
which  many,  indeed,  never  have  left.  They, 
in  our  history,  are  the  Federalists  of  religion. 
And,  like  the  seekers,  they,  also,  have  put 
restrictions  of  temperament  upon  their  faith. 
For  many  Americans  of  the  old  stock  the  breach 
with  authority  made  by  the  Reformation  is 
permanent.  They  could  not  go  back  without 
an  intellectual  debasement  that  would  be  de 
gradation,  not  humility.  For  many  others  the 
scientific  revolution  of  the  nineteenth  century 
has  still  further  unfitted  minds  for  harmony 
with  the  forms  and  pressures  of  the  ecclesias 
tical  past.  Sheer  scientific  materialism  as  an 
explanation  of  God  and  the  universe  has  broken 
down.  The  need  for  religion  emerges  from  the 
controversy  more  palpitating  than  before. 

134 


RELIGION  IN  AMERICA 

Nevertheless,  the  science  of  theology  has  suf 
fered  from  the  science  of  inductive  research. 
Tradition  carries  many  a  man  to  the  door  of 
past  beauty,  decorum,  and  harmonious  faith, 
and  he  longs  to  enter.  But  his  way  is  barred. 
He  leans  upon  and  loves  the  past.  He  can 
not  enter  it.  The  traditionalist,  to  give  him  a 
better  and  more  lovely  name,  has  been  a  bringer 
of  joy  to  many;  but,  like  the  seeker,  his  help 
has  been  partial  only.  He  is  a  chaplain  at 
tendant  upon  the  regiments  of  his  own  faith. 

But  by  far  the  most  significant  product  of 
our  precocious  religiosity  in  America  and  our 
early  emancipation  from  ecclesiastical  control 
has  been  indifferentism — that  American  in 
differentism  which  has  been  easy  because  of 
our  willingness  to  be  responsible  for  our  own 
evils,  wide-spread  because  of  our  necessary 
obsession  with  material  development,  defensible 
in  our  century  of  good  luck  and  the  easy  op 
timism  that  accompanies  it. 

Here  lies  the  group  by  all  odds  the  largest, 

135 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

and  certainly  worthy  of  the  most  anxious 
study.  Here  belongs  the  mass  of  everyday 
Americans  upon  whom  rests  the  outcome  of  the 
immediate  future.  What  lies  beneath  the 
seeming  religious  indifference  of  the  American 
who  is  not  ritualist,  reformer,  or  seeker  for 
spiritual  consolation,  who  is,  in  short,  the  av 
erage  American  of  office,  mill,  and  law-court? 
That  is  the  crux  of  the  problem. 

Indifferentism,  of  course,  is  the  fashion  of 
the  age,  and  fashions  are  always  delusive.  In 
a  Pullman  smoker,  watching  the  faces  that, 
like  a  day  of  south  wind  in  July,  are  soggy,  un- 
illumined,  one  despairs  of  one's  America.  The 
human  product  of  too  much  selling  and  buying 
has  never  been  attractive;  our  half-education 
and  the  semi-intelligence  that  accompanies  it 
have  but  defined  the  ill  features,  like  careful 
breeding  of  pig  or  goat.  It  wras  a  novel  prin 
ciple  of  primitive  Christianity  that  lowliness 
and  poverty  might  hide  the  noblest  soul.  If 
you  followed  these  men  home,  saw  their  minds 

136 


RELIGION  IN  AMERICA 

freed  from  the  pressure  of  competition  and  out 
of  the  atmosphere  of  distrust,  would  your  opin 
ion  alter  ?  Are  their  religious  instincts  hidden 
by  the  mask  of  American  commercialism,  in 
active  merely  because  suppressed  by  custom 
and  fashion  ?  Are  they  lying  fallow  ?  Or  are 
they  like  seed  too  long  dormant  and  decaying? 

If  only  we  knew  by  what  ingenious  statistics 
these  men  might  be  classified,  prophecy  would 
not  be  difficult.  If  only  we  knew  how  many 
have  become  mere  traffickers  in  bodily  com 
fort,  sensualists  in  fact,  whatever  they  may  be 
in  name.  If  only  we  knew  how  many  in  their 
hearts  were  dumb  seekers  for  some  spiritual 
satisfactions  that  would  raise  the  heart  in  ad 
versity,  lift  the  mind  above  the  necessity  for 
safety,  pleasure,  success,  so  that  all  might  be 
pursued,  all  enjoyed,  without  flatness  and  dis 
illusion.  But  no  answer  is  ready;  for  there 
has  been  no  test  of  the  latent  religion  of 
America. 

It  is  true  that  in  the  mass  of  American  in- 

137 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

differentism  the  suppressed  religious  instinct 
exhibits  itself  by  queer  shoots  of  emotional  en 
thusiasm  for  high  things  whether  in  war  or  in 
peace.  It  shows  itself,  or  rather  its  suppres 
sion,  by  unexpected  sentimentalism  in  hard 
places.  It  touches  with  melancholy  many  a 
typical  American  face  in  which  one  would  ex 
pect  to  find  self-satisfaction  or  arrogance.  We 
struggle  with  our  religious  emotions  in  youth, 
suppress  them  in  the  middle  years ;  in  old  age, 
deep  buried  like  a  hidden  disease,  they  torment 
us.  Old  age  is  proverbially  restless  in  Amer 
ica. 

Nevertheless,  the  test  that  will  reveal  how 
much  religion  is  latent  in  our  democracy  has 
not  come  yet ;  nor  have  our  moral  enthusiasms, 
our  spiritual  adventures,  our  Teachings  for  tra 
dition,  been  in  our  day  really  tested  for  the 
spirit  behind  them.  There  is  reason  to  believe 
that  the  time  is  approaching.  In  a  normal  evo 
lution  of  the  bourgeois  society  that  has  made 
America,  some  clear  revelation  must  have  come 

138 


RELIGION  IN  AMERICA 

of  the  religious  spirit  that  as  a  race  and  a  na 
tion  we  are  developing.  Doubtless  we  would 
slowly  have  found  our  way  to  an  expression 
more  true  to  our  nature  than  any  of  the  partial 
modes  so  far  allowed  us.  But  there  will  be  no 
normal,  or  at  least  no  slow,  evolution  in  the 
religious  emotions  of  the  old  Americans.  A 
factor  from  without,  a  sudden  emergency,  calls 
for  an  immediate  reckoning  of  our  spiritual  as 
sets.  All,  in  every  class,  who  are  responsible 
for  the  American  inheritance  of  ideals  and 
morale  and  character  are  challenged,  but  espec 
ially  the  indiflerents.  Those  neutrals  in  the 
conflict  between  spirit  and  matter  can  stay  neu 
tral  no  longer. 

Bourgeois  America,  which  means  most  of 
America,  is,  as  every  one  sees,  on  the  verge  of 
a  revolution  like  the  political-social  revolution 
of  1800.  For  a  century  we  have  pursued 
economics,  and  now  economics  is  pursuing  us. 
A  new  class  is  coming  to  the  front,  and  yet  that, 
perhaps,  is  of  minor  importance  in  America, 

139 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

where  money  and  a  little  education  extinguish 
distinctions  between  classes  in  two  decades. 
What  is  coming  with  more  significance  is  a  new 
social  system,  wherein  a  new  control  of  in 
dustry  and  a  more  equitable  distribution  of  the 
products  thereof  is  to  be  substituted  for  com 
petitive  individualism.  Many  are  skeptical  of 
the  proposed  practices  by  which  this  revolution 
is  to  be  accomplished;  few  now  doubt  that  its 
theory  is  correct  and  will  some  day  be  demon 
strated. 

But  there  has  never  been  a  revolution  of  any 
kind  in  world  history  that  did  not  bring  with  it 
a  revolution  of  all  that  tradition  had  established 
and  custom  made  familiar.  And  this  revolu 
tion,  peaceful  or  otherwise,  that  is  upon  us  dif 
fers  from  earlier  examples  in  that  its  economic 
nature  is  clearly  distinguished  and,  therefore, 
its  challenge  to  all  that  we  term  esthetic,  cul 
tural,  spiritual,  religious,  doubly  sharp  and  di 
rect.  Food,  clothing,  and  recreation,  not  re 
ligious  or  political  liberty,  are  its  legitimate,  but 

140 


RELIGION  IN  AMERICA 

also  its  only  expressed,  objects.  If  it  gains 
these  at  the  expense  of  the  soul — of  what  we  all 
understand  by  the  soul  in  the  ancient  warning, 
"What  is  a  man  profited,  if  he  shall  gain  the 
whole  world,  and  lose  his  own  soul?" — if  it 
gains  material  welfare  and  material  welfare 
only,  it  will  fail ;  and  if  it  fails,  we  all  go  down 
with  it. 

In  western  Europe,  one  guesses,  the  struggle 
between  a  socialism  always  threatening  to  be 
come  purely  materialistic  and  our  own  imper 
fect  order  will  be  differently  conducted. 
There,  and,  especially  in  France  and  Great 
Britain,  church  organizations  are  powerful 
politically,  socially,  and  in  their  grip  upon  the 
popular  imagination.  They  will  sharpen  the 
conflict  and  confuse  the  issues,  making  the 
struggle  seem  to  resemble  many  earlier  combats 
between  church  and  anti-church.  But  in 
bourgeois  America  no  such  easy  and  fallacious 
division  will  be  possible.  Here  the  question  as 
to  whether  the  new  order  is  to  satisfy  the  re- 

141 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

ligious  and  moral,  as  well  as  the  economic, 
needs  of  society  will  rest  squarely  upon  the  in 
dividual  person.  No  church  can  speak  for 
America,  for  no  church  ever  has  held  or  ever 
can  hold  Americans  together.  The  responsi 
bility  here,  and  ultimately  in  Europe,  must  be 
personal.  It  will  come  to  the  question  of  how 
much  religion  is  possessed  by  the  normal  Amer 
ican.  When  he  is  aroused  by  a  struggle  that 
sweeps  into  far  wider  questions  than  the  tariff 
or  the  income  tax,  when  his  method  of  work 
ing,  his  method  of  living,  his  method  of  think 
ing,  are  all  challenged  by  a  new  and  militant 
social  order,  more  dormant  idealism,  more 
latent  cynicisms,  intenser  passions,  will  be 
aroused  than  one  would  ever  have  suspected  in 
that  shrewd  and  easy-going  face  in  the  Pullman 
smoker.  Will  religion  be  aroused  also? 

It  is  essential  that  we  should  bring  about  a 
better  distribution  of  wealth;. that  we  should 
give  every  child  the  equal  opportunity  that 
Jefferson  had  in  mind  when  he  wrote  the  vague, 

142 


RELIGION  IN  AMERICA 

but  magnificent,  phrases  of  the  Declaration  of 
Independence.  Democracy  cannot  be  said  to 
have  been  tried  until  we  have  made  an  economic 
democracy,  and  we  are  too  far  on  the  road  of 
democratic  experiment  to  stop  half-way.  But 
it  is  even  more  essential  that  we  should  carry 
on  into  the  new  community  our  moral  enthu 
siasm,  our  ideals,  and  also  that  reverence  for 
the  shaping  power,  and  love  for  its  manifesta 
tions  that  lie  behind  them,  and  constitute  the  re 
ligious  emotion  which  I  shall  not  here  attempt 
otherwise  to  define.  Many  fear  that  the  nice 
taste,  the  trained  mind,  which  have  been  borne 
upon  the  crest  of  civilization,  will  go  down  in 
the  welter  of  indistinguishable  breakers. 
There  is  little  danger  of  this,  since  already  it 
is  the  intellectuals  who  direct,  and  will  direct, 
the  new  movement;  and  the  professional  man 
stands  to  gain  as  much  as  the  laborer  by  a 
peaceful  revolution.  But  in  a  socialistic  world, 
built  on  the  recovery  of  the  unearned  incre 
ment,  standardized  by  wages,  whose  raison 

143 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

d'etre  is  the  distribution  of  wealth,  it  is  the 
religious  instinct,  with  all  that  its  free  develop 
ment  implies  for  democracy,  that  is  in  the  grav 
est  danger.  If  we  all  become  relatively  rich — 
and  this  is  an  idea  of  the  earthly  paradise  that 
socialism  undoubtedly  encourages — how  many 
will  crawl  through  the  eye  of  the  needle  ? 

The  labor  party  is  not  immediately  respon 
sible  for  the  saving  or  the  freeing  of  the  re 
ligious  instinct.  Its  first  objectives  are  the 
comforts  and  material  opportunities  of  civili 
zation  ;  and  until  these  are  reached  we  have  no 
right  to  expect  religious  leadership  from  the 
proletariat.  If  any  one  is  responsible,  it  is  the 
old  American,  the  bourgeois  American.  He 
has  inherited  the  spiritual  tradition  of  his  an 
cestors;  he  has  profited  by  emancipation  from 
superstition  and  institutional  tyranny;  he  has 
lived  in  a  comfortable  world  with  opportunities 
to  illumine  the  spirit  by  literature  and  the  arts 
and  education.  He  is  not  going  to  be  crushed 
or  driven  out  of  his  inheritance ;  there  are  too 

144 


RELIGION  IN  AMERICA 

many  of  him,  and  he  too  closely  resembles  in 
everything  but  habit  of  life  the  proletariat  that 
is  rising.  Upon  this  American  rests  the 
burden  of  spiritualizing  as  well  as  educating 
his  new  masters — upon  the  moral  enthusiasts, 
the  traditionalists,  the  seekers,  most  of  all.  It 
is  such  a  task  as  the  church  faced  in  the  dark 
ages,  when  barbarians  had  to  be  not  only  spirit 
ualized,  but  civilized  as  well.  It  is  a  lesser 
task,  for  our  new  invaders  are  not  barbarians, 
and  their  leaders  are  intellectually  the  equal  of 
ours.  Whether  the  outlook  for  success  is 
greater,  depends  upon  the  spirit  we  bring  to  the 
enterprise.  Our  knowledge  is  greater;  is  our 
will  that  man  should  make  more  than  a  market 
of  his  time,  sleeping  and  feeding,  as  great  as  the 
great  wills  of  earlier  centuries  ? 

No  one  can  answer ;  but  of  this  we  can  be  as 
sured,  that  the  solution  rests  in  American  in- 
differentism.  If  the  commercial  American  is 
as  material  as  he  looks,  if  common  sense  is  his 
only  good,  if  his  idealism  is  merely  inherited 

145 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

habit,  if  he  responds  to  two  impulses  only,  rest 
lessness  and  sentimentality,  then  he  will  go  over 
to  socialism  in  its"  most  mechanical  phase  and, 
instead  of  saving  the  new  party,  he  will  ruin  it. 
Potentially  the  most  ardent  supporters  of  a 
purely  materialistic  socialism,  in  which  the  in 
dividual  person  counts  for  nothing  aside  from 
his  appetites,  are  precisely  the  "practical"  busi 
ness  men  who  now  curse  the  new  order  most 
loudly  because  it  threatens  their  accumulations. 
For  them  it  is  civil  war  between  seekers  for  the 
dollar ;  and  civil  war  is  always  the  bitterest,  and 
the  soonest  healed.  Such  men  have  been  our 
leaders.  Is  the  army  behind  them? 

I  think  that  the  rank  and  file  of  bourgeois 
America  are  less  concerned  with  wealth  and  the 
struggle  for  wealth  than  we  suppose.  I  think 
that  they  are  not  so  much  dazzled  by  millions 
as  in  the  'nineties ;  more  anxious  for  simplicity 
of  heart,  which  spells  content,  and  worthiness 
of  aim,  which  satisfies  conscience,  than  one 
would  guess  from  Wall  Street  or  Broadway  or 

146 


RELIGION  IN  AMERICA 

public  life  in  the  Middle  West.  I  think  that, 
while  distrusting  the  economic  paradise  of  the 
more  material  socialists,  they  are  closer  in  sym 
pathy  to  a  thoughtful  laborer  than  to  a  cynical 
capitalist.  If  the  religious  instinct  among 
them  emerges  as  a  disgust  for  petty  emotions, 
as  a  passionate  interest  in  humanity,  as  a  will 
ingness  to  sacrifice  privilege  and  prejudice  for 
a  fuller  life  more  generously  shared,  if  the  re 
ligion  of  our  democracy  finds  no  more  ex 
pression  than  this,  the  crisis  will  pass.  If  even 
thus  far  indifferentism  should  yield  to  active 
spiritual  faith,  the  bourgeoisie  would  cease 
being  bourgeois,  and  we  could  cease  to  fear  the 
triumph  of  the  proletariate,  since,  if  there  was 
anything  good  in  our  old  stock,  we  could  con 
vert  them  to  it. 

But  if  the  American  has  lost  his  religious 
instincts,  if  behind  his  practical  common  sense 
and  his  vigorous  idealism  and  his  eager  experi 
ments  in  spirituality  there  is  nothing  but  a  rest 
less  energy  working  upon  the  momentum  of 

147 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

convictions  long  dead,  then  let  the  new  Amer 
icans  absorb  us  quickly,  for  we  are  worn  out. 

With  all  humbleness,  with  a  full  realization 
of  the  trivialities  of  hustle  and  bustle  in  which 
we  have  sunk  our  religion,  with  concern  for 
our  escape  from  easy-going  optimism  and  skep 
tical  content,  I,  for  one,  feel  too  sure  of  the 
depth  of  our  racial  legacy  of  reverence,  and  the 
fundamental  religiosity  of  the  American  char 
acter  at  its  truest,  to  admit  for  a  moment  that 
conclusion  of  despair. 


148 


CHAPTER  VI 

LITERATURE   IN   AMERICA 

"Fix't  in  sublimest  thought  behold  them  rise 
World  after  world  unfolding  to  their  eyes, 
Lead,  light,  allure  them  thro*  the  total  plan 
And  give  new  guidance  to  the  paths  of  man." 


were  the  modest  aspirations  for 
American  genius,  and  especially  Amer 
ican  literary  genius,  expressed  by  Joel  Barlow, 
the  once  famous  author,  in  his  "Columbiad"  of 
1807. 

It  was  not  a  democratic  literature,  as  we  un 
derstand  the  term,  that  Barlow,  and  hundreds 
of  others  on  both  sides  of  the  Atlantic,  hoped 
and  expected  to  see  arise  in  the  new  republic. 
It  was  not  a  literature  that  would  interpret  the 
homely,  though  vigorous,  personality  of  a  new 
nation.  Nothing  so  concrete  and  so  common- 

149 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

place  as  this  would  have  raised  their  ardor  to 
such  a  pitch.  The  excitable  critics  of  that  day 
were  concerned  with  the  absolute,  the  ideal,  and 
the  abstract.  Liberty,  not  equality,  had  at  last 
found  a  dwelling-place,  and  the  free  spirit  of 
man  was  to  expand  in  an  illimitable  continent 
as  never  before,  and  create  the  poetry  of 
freedom  and  the  epic  of  liberated  mankind. 
But  their  vast  expectations  were  based  upon  a 
misconception  and  surrounded  by  fallacies. 
They  have  not  been  realized;  and  this  is  one 
reason  for  the  prevailing  idea  that  literary 
America  has  been  a  disappointment,  that  the 
life  of  the  mind  in  America  has  lagged  be 
hind  its  opportunities,  that  we  are  a  backward 
race  in  literature  and  the  arts.  We  seem 
children  to-day  beside  the  dreams  of  our 
ancestors. 

It  is  easy  enough  to  see  now  that  a  race  which 
had  to  construct  a  nation  in  a  continent  in  large 
part  scarcely  habitable  was  not  ready  to  sing  the 
epic  of  freedom.  Freedom  had  been  won,  but 

ISO 


LITERATURE  IN  AMERICA 

whether  it  would  be  possible  to  possess  and  en 
joy  it  depended  not  upon  lyrical  interpretation, 
but  upon  statecraft,  the  broadax,  toil,  transpor 
tation,  and  the  rifle.  And  when  the  pioneer 
ing  days  were  over,  political  freedom,  freedom 
of  conscience  and  the  individual  man,  belonged 
as  truly  to  other  great  nations  who  were  equally 
entitled  to  create  the  literature  of  the  free  mind. 
To  expect  the  ideals  of  liberty  to  appear  in 
American  literature  was  legitimate,  but  to  look 
for  a  great  poetic  outburst  in  nineteenth- 
century  America  just  because  this  republic  first 
established  a  new  political  order  was  no  more 
reasonable  than  to  demand  a  new  style  in  archi 
tecture  from  the  erectors  of  the  first  capitol  in 
the  trans- Alleghany  wilderness. 

What  should  have  been  asked  of  us,  at  least 
after  the  defeat  of  the  Federalist  party  had 
made  certain,  what  before  was  only  probable, 
that  America  would  become  a  democracy,  was 
a  literature  which  should  express  the  ideals  per 
vading  our  particular  brand  of  democratic  life, 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

a  literature  which  should  describe  a  society  in 
which  social  distinctions  were  elastic,  oppor 
tunity  was  superabundant,  and,  for  the  first 
time  in  the  modern  world,  the  common  people 
become  more  powerful  than  the  uncommon.  A 
democratic  literature  could  rightly  have  been 
expected  from  America.  But  such  a  literature 
would  never  have  been  termed  "sublimest 
thought"  by  our  early  enthusiasts.  It  would 
have  to  suffer  from  the  tawdriness  of  the 
masses,  and  develop  as  slowly  as  they  develop. 
It  would  have  to  be  more  prose  than  poetry,  for 
American  life  outwardly  was  prosaic  except 
upon  its  borders,  and  often  gross  and  barbarous 
there.  It  would  have  to  struggle  upward  like 
a  flapping  heron,  not  soar  like  the  eagle  of  our 
dreams.  And  in  the  earlier  period,  perhaps  in 
most  periods  of  the  republic,  few  literary 
dreamers  even  wished  that  America  should  be 
come  a  democracy. 

In  many  respects  we  got,  and  got  very  soon, 
such  a  literature,  and  much  of  it  has  endured. 

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The  prose  or  poetry  that  took  upon  itself  to  let 
the  eagle  scream  for  liberty  has  quite  generally 
gone  into  oblivion,  and  with  reason ;  it  is  either 
crude  and  blatant,  or  solemn  and  hackneyed 
pretentiousness,  like  Barlow's  "Columbiad" 
and  much  of  Dwight's  "Conquest  of  Canaan." 
The  "less  enraptured"  strains  of  Irving  and 
Hawthorne  and  Clemens  and  Holmes  and 
Bret  Harte,  in  which  the  hopes,  the  prejudices, 
the  idiosyncrasies,  and  the  passions  of  a  nascent 
civilization  were  expressed  in  prose  as  well  as 
poetry,  and  in  humor  more  frequently  than  in 
epic  grandeur,  have  had  a  thousand  times  more 
virility.  They  have  sprung  from  a  social  and 
esthetic  need,  not  a  romantic  conception,  and 
though  not  an  epoch-making  celebration  of 
freedom  finally  brought  to  earth,  they  have  been 
a  solid  contribution  to  the  literature  of  the 
world  and  a  beginning  of  the  literature  of  the 
American  democracy. 

The  real  issue  of  course  was  not  Freedom 
and  Liberty  and  the  other  capitalizations  of  the 

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EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

abstract,  but  we,  the  Americans.  And  the  real 
question  is  whether  American  literature  has 
met  its  proper,  not  its  assumed,  specifications. 
If  one  considers  the  past,  the  answer  inclines 
toward  the  affirmative. 

There  have  been  two  chief  strains  in  Amer 
ican  literature,  not  always  distinct,  but  in  origin 
different.  In  the  first  belong  those  writers 
whose  dominant  purpose  has  been  to  appeal  to 
the  best  in  the  many;  and  by  the  best  I  mean 
the  finest  or  the  deepest  emotions,  and  by  the 
many  I  mean  the  accessible  minds  of  the  de 
mocracy.  Emerson  belongs  primarily  here, 
and  Hawthorne,  and,  though  he  would  have 
denied  it,  Whitman.  Henry  James  in  his 
earlier  stories  is  a  lovable  example;  and  when 
he  pursued  his  magical  art  into  realms  where 
only  the  trained  appreciation  could  follow, 
Mrs.  Wharton  put  on  the  mantle.  In  the 
second  have  been  the  more  numerous  writ 
ers  whose  chief  purpose,  not  always  a  con 
scious  one,  has  been  to  touch  and  interest  and 

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LITERATURE  IN  AMERICA 

arouse  not  so  much  the  best  as  the  commonest, 
the  most  universal  emotions.  Cooper  is  the 
most  excellent  example  of  great  writing  in  this 
group.  Mark  Twain  when  not  misanthropic, 
Bret  Harte  in  all  moods,  Whittier  and  Long 
fellow,  Riley  and  O.  Henry,  and  a  host  of  the 
less  distinguished,  also  belong  there. 

But  far  more  important  than  this  division  in 
purpose,  which,  after  all,  is  hard  to  make  and 
harder  still  to  keep,  is  the  fact,  if  one  may  speak 
of  high  esthetic  matters  in  a  biological  fashion, 
of  constant  cross-fertilization  between  these 
strains,  and  especially  in  the  men  we  call  great. 
Americans  who  felt  impelled  to  write  of  the 
ideal  best  have  not  forgotten  the  needs  of  a  na 
tion  slowly  moving  toward  democracy.  Those 
who  wrote  to  amuse  and  interest  the  populace 
have  felt  in  a  curious  fashion  their  respon 
sibility  for  what  they  considered  American 
ideals.  Tribute  has  been  paid  by  both  sides, 
though  each  in  its  own  fashion,  to  democracy ; 
and  this  makes  an  unexpected  congruity  be- 

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EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

tween  appeals  to  the  best  and  satisfactions  for 
the  many,  between  Emerson  and  popular  fiction. 
The  scholar  presents  his  idealistic  optimism  as 
an  attempt  to  explain  where  the  eager  swarm 
ought  to  be  winging.  The  story-teller,  though 
inspired  not  by  ideas,  but  by  the  chance  to  in 
terest  an  energetic  society  absorbed  in  the  con 
quest  of  nature  and  hot-blooded  with  the  taste 
of  success,  yet  feels  bound  to  urge  what  he 
feels  to  be  American  morality  and  American 
idealism. 

This  common  sympathy  with  democracy  is 
the  hope  of  American  literature  in  the  sharp 
tests  of  our  nationality  now  almost  upon  us. 
Emerson  and  Cooper,  Hawthorne  and  Mark 
Twain,  are  examples  of  what  once  it  could  do. 

Emerson  was  a  man  who  never  courted  or 
obtained  popularity,  who  hitched  his  readers  to 
a  star  instead  of  a  plot  or  a  sensation,  who 
wrote  always  for  minds  that  may  have  been 
democratic,  but  certainly  could  not  have  been 
common.  Cooper,  like  Shakespeare,  was  an 

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LITERATURE  IN  AMERICA 

aristocrat  in  tastes,  a  democrat  by  sympathy 
and  conviction,  whose  stories,  even  his  bad 
stories,  contained  that  essential  adventure,  that 
rapid  and  unexpected  and  successful  action, 
which  satisfies  the  universal  craving  for  strug 
gle  well  ended,  stories  so  popular  that  his  ene 
mies  were  entranced  by  them  even  while  they 
abused  him. 

The  contrast  is  sharp.  And  yet,  if  the  great 
ness  of  Emerson  is  the  airy  strength  of  his 
ideology,  his  permanence  in  the  history  of 
American  civilization  is  determined  by  the  ex 
pression  he  gave  to  the  moral  optimism  of  the 
typical  American.  And  if  the  popularity  of 
Cooper  was  due  to  the  unflagging  interest  of 
his  adventure  and  the  romance  of  his  actors 
and  his  scenes,  nevertheless  what  makes  him 
more  than  a  good  story-teller  and  gives  him 
great  place  in  the  social  history  of  America  is 
his  incarnation  of  the  ideals  and  the  morality 
of  a  native  democracy  in  Deerslayer,  whom  all 
Americans  could  understand  and  admire. 

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EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

Or  consider  Hawthorne  and  Mark  Twain. 
Hawthorne  was  a  moralist  romancer  whose 
austere  talents  forced  admiration  and  a  some 
what  doubtful  popularity.  Twain  touched  the 
universal  note  of  humorous  exaggeration  so 
early  and  so  readily  that  his  stern  moral  basis 
went  unremarked.  Men  read  him  for  humor 
as  they  read  Cooper  for  romance,  absorbing 
the  ideas  of  each  as  unconsciously  as  the  child 
takes  medicine  in  a  sugared  glass. 

Nevertheless,  if  in  Hawthorne  the  burden  of 
lofty  moral  ideals  is  more  evident  than  any  ap 
peal  to  the  masses,  yet  the  most  careless  reader 
feels  that  his  warnings  are  for  a  new  world  that 
has  broken  with  tradition  and  must  face  its 
problems  of  sin  and  sex  in  a  democracy  of  con 
science.  And  if  Mark  Twain  writes  obviously 
to  amuse  the  democracy,  yet  he  seldom  fails  to 
preach  to  them  also.  "Huckleberry  Finn/'  to 
the  loving,  thoughtful  reader,  is  among  other 
things  an  epic  of  the  injustice,  the  inconsistency 
of  sophisticated  man  and  his  social  system,  seen 

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LITERATURE  IN  AMERICA 

through  the  eyes  of  the  new  world  on  the 
Mississippi,  where  tradition,  in  the  fresh,  crude 
light,  showed  its  seams  of  decay.  There  is  a 
tract  upon  slavery  in  "Huckleberry  Finn,"  and 
another  upon  dueling,  and  a  third  on  social  dis 
tinctions,  and  a  fourth  upon  conventionalized 
religion.  And  readers  of  Clemens  will  not 
forget  how  the  bones  of  his  acrid  philosophy 
wore  through  the  skin  of  his  humor  in  those 
later  books,  especially  in  "The  Mysterious 
Stranger/'  where  a  hatred  of  social  injustice 
and  the  melancholy  foreboding  which  has  al 
ways  accompanied  the  optimism  of  American 
democracy  had  such  full  escape  that  the  pub 
lishers  were  led  to  print  it  as  a  fairytale  for 
children  that  it  might  be  enjoyed  by  minds  too 
unobservant  to  trouble  with  its  warnings. 

I  do  not  wish  to  seem  to  be  docketing  all 
American  literature  in  these  brief  compari 
sons.  What  I  desire  is  to  point  to  this  com 
mon  interest  of  our  writers  in  the  needs  of 
democracy.  Whitman,  who  wrote  always  for 

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EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

the  most  vigorous  and  sometimes  for  the  best 
emotions  of  the  many,  might  continue  the  ar 
gument.  Howells,  whose  zest  for  the  familiar 
experience  kept  his  penetrating  intellect  busy 
with  problems  important  for  democracy,  is  an 
other  example.  Poe,  and  Henry  James  in  his 
later  years,  fall  without  both  groups,  being  as 
indifferent  to  democracy  as  they  are  solicitous 
for  art.  That  is  their  distinction.  Indeed,  it 
is  by  such  men  that  the  writers  who  sway  the 
masses  are  trained  in  the  technique  of  their 
craft. 

In  short,  by  and  large,  our  literature  is  re 
markable  for  its  substructure  of  what  might  be 
called  democratic  idealism — idealism  applied  to 
the  needs  of  a  growing  democracy.  If  the 
reader  doubts,  let  him  compare  Emerson  with 
Carlyle,  Cooper  with  Scott,  Hawthorne  with 
Tennyson,  Whitman  with  Browning,  and  an 
swer  whether  our  writers  have  not  been  formed 
by  the  social  needs  of  America. 

That  this  is  true  of  so  many  men,  and  has 
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LITERATURE  IN  AMERICA 

led  to  the  cross-fertilization  between  popular 
writers  and  intellectuals  of  which  I  have  writ 
ten  above,  is  perhaps  more  readily  explained 
when  one  considers  how  homogeneous  our  so 
ciety  has  been,  how  few  and  how  slight  its 
mental  cleavages.  Conservative  and  radical, 
traditionalist  and  anti-traditionalist,  democrat 
and  aristocrat — such  clefts  have  not  gone  so 
deep  with  us  as  with  other  nations.  Except  for 
times  of  stress,  as  in  the  decade  between  1765 
and  1775,  or  in  the  years  just  before  the  Civil 
War,  it  would  be  hard  to  group,  for  example, 
our  writers  by  fundamental  differences  in  their 
philosophy  of  living.  Whitman  one  could 
classify,  and  Poe  and  Irving,  but  the  difficulty 
rapidly  increases  as  the  list  lengthens.  We 
have  been  homogeneous  by  a  common  tradi 
tion  of  liberalism,  by  a  common  environment 
varying  not  too  greatly  between  Boston  and  the 
newer  West.  And  our  literature  has  re 
sembled  us. 

And  now,  when  at  last  our  literature,  like  our 
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EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

politics  and  our  economics,  must  at  last 
challenge  world  scrutiny,  this  national  charac 
ter,  and  all  that  represents  it,  has  come  sud 
denly  to  seem  of  vast  importance.  We  have 
become  vividly  aware  of  it,  and  we  realize  that 
we  are  in  dire  need  of  self-expression — of  self- 
expression  by  new  literature.  The  self-con 
sciousness  of  Americans  throughout  the  nine 
teenth  century,  which  showed  itself  keenly  in 
their  restlessness  under  foreign  criticism  and 
their  irrepressible  desire  to  talk  about  God's 
country,  was  of  a  different  kind.  It  was  due  to 
a  nervous  uncertainty  as  to  the  success  of  the 
American  experiment.  We  were  more  con 
cerned  with  what  others  thought  of  our  quali 
ties  than  with  what  we  were  or  had  been.  But 
three  things  have  altered  our  situation  radi 
cally,  and  made  us  think  more  of  character  and 
less  of  reputation. 

The  first  is  the  absolute  success,  as  success  is 
measured  by  the  world's  finger,  of  this  Ameri 
can  experiment.  The  hope  of  the  founders  to 

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LITERATURE  IN  AMERICA 

establish  a  stable  and  prosperous  republican 
government  where  life,  property,  conscience, 
and  opinion  were  safe  has  been  realized. 

The  second  and  more  sensational  change 
came  from  the  Great  War,  which  gave  us  that 
quiet  confidence  in  our  national  strength  that 
comes  when  recognition  from  without  confirms 
the  fact  and  makes  self-assertion  unnecessary. 

The  third,  and  probably  the  most  important, 
has  bee)i  the  rise,  to  intellectual  influence  and 
cultural  and  social  power  of  aliens — Irish,  Ger 
man,  most  of  all  Jews — who,  unlike  the  earlier 
immigrants,  do  not  cherish  as  their  chief  wish 
the  desire  to  become  in  every  sense  American. 
Such  phenomena  as  an  Alexander  Hamilton  or 
Thomas  Paine,  becoming  almost  from  the  day 
of  their  landing  more  native  than  the  natives, 
are  becoming  rarer  and  rarer.  More  and 
more  we  must  count  upon  cosmopolitans  of 
brains  and  ability  among  us  who  know  not  Is 
rael,  though  they  may  love  the  traditions  of 
their  home  lands  even  less.  It  is  this  new 

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EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

America,  heterogeneous,  brilliant,  useful,  but 
disturbing,  that  has  more  than  anything  else 
sharpened  the  self-consciousness  of  America, 
turned  us  toward  introspection,  made  us  sensi 
ble  of  our  homogeneity,  and  the  new  alignments 
inevitable  for  the  future. 

And  just  as  at  the  turn  of  the  eighteenth 
century  enthusiasts  were  clamoring  for  a  new 
literature  from  America,  in  which  freedom  and 
liberty  should  have  their  apotheosis,  so  now  the 
awakened  consciousness  of  Americans  of  the 
older  stock  is  clamoring  for  the  expression  of 
what  they  vaguely  denominate,  and  still  more 
vaguely  describe,  as  Americanism.  Like  all 
such  terms  called  forth  by  a  crisis  and  displayed 
like  a  flag  or  a  button,  the  term  is  at  the  same 
time  indefinite  and  full  of  significance.  Ten 
men  and  women  will  in  ten  different  ways  de 
fine  it.  And  yet  none  can  doubt  that  vast  feel 
ing  lies  behind  the  word,  and  would  crystallize, 
if  power  were  given  it,  into  an  expression  of  our 
national  experience  and  aspirations  and  ideals 

164 


LITERATURE  IN  AMERICA 

as  we  have  lived  with  them  and  seen  them  de 
velop  for  a  century. 

And  opposed  to  this  clamor  for  a  literature 
of  Americanism  is  another  call,  not  loud  yet, 
but  rising — a  demand  for  a  different  literature, 
mordant,  sophisticated,  cosmopolitan,  which 
will  cut  at  the  sentimentalities  in  which  our 
idealism  has  involved  us,  strike  at  the  moribund 
liberalism  which  we  still  regard  as  our  basis  of 
action,  take  issue  with  the  moral  standards  that 
have  been  received  as  irrevocable  because  they 
were  American.  Keenly  aware  of  the  need  for 
a  more  honest  and  more  vigorous  expression  of 
what  America  means  to-day,  and  sensitive  to 
these  caustic  attacks  upon  all  that  we  have 
called  American,  the  thoughtful  mind  finds 
little  to  console  it  in  the  clever,  sentimental  writ 
ing  which,  with  sewing-machines,  dental  pastes, 
ready-made  clothes,  and  cheap  motor-cars,  has 
become  one  of  the  standarized  products  of 
America. 

There  has  been  one  response  already  to  the 

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EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

awakening  national  consciousness,  and  this, 
curiously  enough,  has  been  almost  identical 
with  the  reaction  of  the  new  republic  a  century 
and  more  ago  to  its  responsibilities.  Then  the 
first  writing  which  commanded  attention  here 
and  abroad  was  to  be  found  in  so-called  state 
papers,  declarations  of  Congress  and  legisla 
tures,  pamphlets  by  Adams  and  Hamilton  and 
Jefferson.  And  the  first  response  to  our 
modern  clamor  for  Americanism  has  also  been 
in  state  papers,  beginning  perhaps  with  Roose 
velt's  administration  and  continuing  through 
Wilson's  messages  and  the  many  documents  on 
the  war.  The  worth  and  significance  of  many 
of  these  public  utterances  have  commanded 
world-wide  respect,  and  possible  permanence  in 
literature. 

Yet  it  is  rarely  that  state  papers  can  satisfy 
a  national  need  for  literature.  They  are  too 
restricted  in  their  interests  and  too  occasional 
in  their  provenance.  It  is  only  once  in  a 
century  that  a  Gettysburg  Address  sums  up  the 

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LITERATURE  IN  AMERICA 

political  and  moral  philosophy  of  millions  or  a 
discourse  on  the  needs  and  obligations  of  de 
mocracy  unites  public  opinion  in  America  and 
Europe.  The  emotions  of  the  race  seek  outlet 
and  interpretation  in  pure  literature,  and  here 
the  American  response  is  more  doubtful. 

None  of  the  more  popular  brands  of  con 
temporary  writing  seems  to  satisfy  the  craving 
for  national  self-expression.  It  is  true  that  we 
are  going  in  for  universals.  Our  books  reach 
the  hundred  thousands,  and  our  magazines  the 
millions.  The  successful  writer  of  plays, 
stories,  or  special  articles  trades  in  the  thoughts 
that  circulate  through  a  vast  community  of 
common  education,  experience,  and  environ 
ment.  The  result  is  to  spread  and  perpetuate 
the  ideals  and  the  liberal  hopes  that  we  call 
American,  but  also  to  stereotype  and  thus 
weaken  their  influence.  They  become  counters 
in  a  game,  or,  better  still,  standardized  foods 
for  the  imagination,  whose  popularity  is  certain 
until  the  fashion  wears  out.  The  writer  of  ad- 

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EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

venturous  fiction  to-day  uses  the  same  formulas 
as  did  Cooper,  because  he  writes  for  a  people 
still  true  to  the  mold  of  that  America  which 
they  have  inherited  directly  in  family  life,  or 
indirectly  in  the  schools.  But  his  idealism  is 
faint  beside  Cooper's;  his  "strong,  simple 
Americans"  too  often  mere  fabrications  when 
compared  with  Deerslayer,  or  crude,  vulgar 
ized  approximations,  like  sculptures  of  the 
decadent  fourth  century.  Vulgarization  is  the 
menace  of  democratic  literature — vulgarization 
by  smart  and  cheap  short  stories,  by  plays 
where  the  wit  is  raw,  the  sentiment  mushy,  the 
characters,  like  their  language,  cheap  and  mean. 
Slang  can  be  racy;  colloquialism  belongs  to  a 
literature  of  the  people;  to  be  homely  is  often 
to  be  lovable  and  true :  but  a  literature,  no  mat 
ter  how  moral,  which  in  its  lack  of  clarity  and 
sweetness  is  like  a  glass  of  dirty  water,  is  a 
heavy  price  to  pay  for  mere  circulation.  The 
appeal  to  universals  is  essential  in  a  democracy, 
but  unless  clarified  by  love  and  hope  and  con- 

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LITERATURE  IN  AMERICA 

viction,  it  leads  toward  universal  vulgarity. 
Nor  does  the  prospect  cheer  if  one  looks  to 
the  contemporary  Brahmins,  who  seek  not  the 
universal,  but  the  particular ;  who  write  for  the 
best,  not  the  broadest,  emotions  of  democracy. 
Lowells  and  Emersons  have  not  yet  reappeared 
in  our  society.  No  Emerson  has  philosophized 
the  reactions  of  America  to  international  obli 
gation  ;  no  Lowell  assailed  militarist  and  pacif 
ist  alike  in  the  war ;  no  Whitman  even  has  sung 
commonplace  America  become  momentarily 
heroic  in  the  cause  of  a  half-understood  democ 
racy.  We  have  had  an  abundance  of  writing 
directed  to  fine  minds  and  fine  souls,  but  it  has 
lacked  the  authentic  note  of  national  inspira 
tion. 

•Perhaps  the  coldness  of  our  intellectual 
literature  has  been  due  to  the  specialization  of 
the  age.  A  Lowell,  an  Emerson,  even  a  Long 
fellow,  has  been  difficult  for  the  last  three 
decades.  Learned  men,  like  these,  have  been 
driven  by  the  public  opinion  of  their  world 

169 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

toward  investigation  and  scientific  research. 
They  have  been  weighted  with  a  frightful  re 
sponsibility  for  facts;  they  have  been  better 
scholars  than  their  predecessors,  but  less  effec 
tive  citizens.  The  tool-cutter  nowadays  knows 
only  his  own  operation.  The  scholar  and 
philosopher  have  a  lifetime  of  labor  assigned 
them,  with  no  time  to  become  acquainted  with 
their  United  States.  In  nineteenth-century 
America  there  was  little  place  for  the  scholar. 
He  was  driven  into  the  world,  and  if  scholar 
ship  lost,  we  profited.  Now  his  corner  is  built 
for  him,  and  he  has  gone  into  it. 

As  a  result  of  all  this  we  face  a  very  real 
danger.  American  literature,  with  its  burden 
of  ideals  and  experience,  being  cheapened 
by  writers  for  the  mob  and  deserted  by  the 
academician,  may  lose  its  virility  and  pale  be 
fore  a  new  literature  of  cosmopolitanism,  which 
could  find  no  better  breeding-place  than  Chi 
cago  or  New  York. 

Artistically,  this  might  be  no  calamity. 
170 


LITERATURE  IN  AMERICA 

Such  a  society  as  a  great  American  city 
presents  has  never  before  been  seen  in  the 
world,  not  even  in  Rome,  and  the  international 
democracy  which  it  forecasts  is  worthy  already 
of  a  great  literature,  has,  indeed,  already  begun 
one.  But  we  old  Americans,  even  though  our 
age  is  of  only  two  generations,  are  not  yet  ready 
for  international  democracy.  Our  own  racial 
character  has  not  received  its  final  stamp,  come 
to  full  self-expression,  established  itself  as  the 
permanent  influence  upon  the  world's  develop 
ment  which  our  career  and  our  opportunities 
should  make  it.  To  rush  into  literary  interna 
tionalism  before  the  long  American  experience 
has  ripened  into  a  national  democracy  would  be 
to  skip  a  step.  It  is  to  commit  again  the  error 
of  our  forefathers,  who  proposed  an  epic  of 
liberty  before  we  had  freed  ourselves  from  the 
burden  of  economic  development. 

And  what  we  need  is  precisely  such  a  cross- 
fertilizatiori  between  the  mind  that  reaches  for 
the  best  and  the  imagination  which  feels  for 

171 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

the  many,  as  one  finds  in  varying  measures  in 
Mark  Twain  and  Holmes,  in  Cooper  and  Whit 
man  and  Emerson.  It  must  be  a  different  and 
perhaps  a  more  mature  product,  but  nothing 
else  can  make  American  ideals  worth  saving  in 
literature,  for  nothing  else  can  grasp  the 
shrewd  native  quality  of  this  people,  which  is 
still  pervasive  through  all  our  alien  swarms. 

For  three  centuries  now  we  have  been  at  our 
experiment  in  democracy.  We  have  been 
sordid  and  we  have  been  magnificent.  We 
have  been  timorous  and  we  have  set  examples 
for  hardihood  in  man.  We  have  stumbled 
blindly  on  our  road,  and  we  have  had  great 
moments  of  illumination.  We  have  not  made 
a  perfect  democracy,  but  perhaps  more  men, 
women,  and  children  have  been  happy  in 
America  than  elsewhere  in  world  history. 
And  on  the  whole  our  course  has  been  consist 
ently  onward.  No  purpose  of  the  founders  has 
f  ai1ed  to  continue ;  no  valuable  element  of  char 
acter  has  yet  been  lost  by  the  way.  We  are  no 

172 


LITERATURE  IN  AMERICA 

worse  men,  by  and  large,  than  our  forefathers. 
And  either  this  great  experiment  is  worth  some 
thing  or  it  is  not. 

If  it  is  worth  something,  it  must  pass  into 
literature,  and  find  men  to  make  it  pass.  And 
these  men  and  women  must  be  lovers  of  what 
we  have  done  here  and  what  we  are,  as  the 
young  poets  of  England  at  war  were  above  all 
lovers  of  their  blessed  England.  They  cannot 
be  scoffers  at  our  loose-held  ideals  and  our 
nervous  commercialism,  who  scold,  which  is 
easy,  a  great,  though  uneven,  nation,  but  do  not 
search  out  the  cause  of  its  greatness  and  pro 
claim  its  hope.  Nor  can  they  be  recluses  con 
temptuous  of  that  public  in  whose  progressive 
refinement  lies  the  only  chance  for  democracy. 
Nor  mere  buyers  and  sellers  of  emotion  who 
have  learned  the  speech  of  the  great  beast,  as 
Hamilton  called  the  common  people,  only  to 
make  profit  by  it. 

But  you  cannot  summon  a  literature  from 
the  vasty  deep  by  calling  for  it  in  oratorical 

173 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

vein.  Perhaps,  even  now  as  I  write,  some  wise 
youth,  who  takes  his  task  more  seriously  than 
himself,  has  begun  in  humor  a  poem  that  is 
meant  for  some  newspaper  column,  but  will  be 
come  a  better  description  than  an  essay  can 
give  of  the  American  who  has  been  doing  so 
much,  but  thinking  also,  who  still  knows  how 
to  grin  at  misfortune,  and  is  not  yet  ready  to 
declare  himself  bankrupt  in  ideas,  deficient  in 
character,  or  pallid  in  imaginative  faith.  As 
a  nation  we  did  our  boasting  early  and  got  it 
out  of  our  system;  but  the  confidence  and  the 
strength  and  the  hope  that  inspired  that  boast 
ing  remain,  and  approach  fruition. 


174 


CHAPTER  VII 

THE   BOURGEOIS   AMERICAN 

IN  the  preceding  chapters  there  has  been 
much  said  of  conservatism  and  radicalism, 
of  idealism  and  the  religious  instinct,  of  litera 
ture  that  expresses  the  soul  of  a  race.  Never 
theless,  when  we  look  about  in  this  our  Amer 
ica,  it  is  painfully  clear  that  not  these  absolutes 
but  man  who  makes  and  possesses  them  must 
chiefly  concern  us.  It  is  the  American  who  will 
make  or  break  his  religion,  his  literature,  his 
politics.  He  is  the  entity.  He  is  our  destiny. 
And  therefore  one  comes  back  after  a  survey 
of  American  traits,  their  strengths,  and  their 
weaknesses,  to  the  man  himself.  Can  we  name 
him  in  this  hive  of  millions?  Can  we  find  an 
everyday  American  that  will  be  accepted  here 
as  typical,  and  be  recognized  abroad  ?  If  there 

175 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

is  such  a  type,  it  will  be  among  the  middle  class, 
the  bourgeois  Americans,  that  we  shall  discover 
it.  The  landholding  aristocracy  has  passed. 
The  moneyed  aristocracy  is  in  the  best  (and 
sometimes  in  the  worst)  sense  bourgeois.  Cos 
mopolitans  are  few.  The  intellectual  aristoc 
racy  is  but  half  emerged,  like  a  statue  of 
Rodin's,  from  the  common  clay. 

What  we  find  now  is  the  middle  class  incar 
nate.  What  we  may  expect  soon  is  the 
finished  product  of  bourgeois  life  in  America. 
For  it  is  clear  that  this  life  is  now  in  full  career. 
We  exult  in  it,  and  its  characteristic  virtues. 
We  deprecate  aristocracy.  We  heap  scorn 
upon  the  proletariat  and  persecute  its  prophets. 
Better  evidence  still,  no  sooner  does  a  new 
group  rise  to  security  in  our  social  system  than 
it  becomes  visibly  bourgeois,  and,  what  is  more 
important,  mentally  bourgeois.  This  has  been 
true  of  the  railway  employees,  the  carpenters, 
the  plumbers,  the  tenant  farmers,  and  many 
others.  It  has  been  also  true  of  the  "aristoc- 

176 


THE  BOURGEOIS  AMERICAN 

racy"  in  the  old  sense  of  the  word,  whether  na 
tive  or  European.  They  have  come  into  the 
fold,  sometimes  reluctantly,  sometimes  at  a  run 
with  poverty  barking  behind  them.  All  these 
groups  have  been  captured  by  the  dominant 
class.  And  if  the  nature  of  our  industrial 
system  still  keeps  them  in  alignment  against  the 
capitalist  (who  is  the  soul  of  bourgeoisie)  or 
dependent  upon  him,  nevertheless  they  think  as 
he  does  on  all  questions  not  involving  work  and 
wages,  and  especially  in  religion,  politics,  and 
morality.  They  act  as  he  does ;  and  the  labor 
groups  are  coming  to  fight  as  he  does,  and  for 
the  same  ends. 

All  major  influences  in  our  American  life 
seem  to  be  directed  toward  this  consummation, 
which  is  triumphant,  or  dismal,  according  to 
your  point  of  view.  The  racial  factor  may 
seem  to  be  an  exception,  but  is  not.  It  is  true 
that  as  the  old  American  assimilates  more  and 
more  non-Teutonic  and  non-Latin  races  to  his 
way  of  living,  his  psychology  alters,  and  his 

177 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

habits  are  likely  to  follow.  It  is  also  true  that 
the  immigrant  belongs  prevailingly  to  the 
peasantry  or  the  proletariat.  But  the  immi 
grant  has  substantially  no  influence  upon  the 
dominant  class  until  he  is  Americanized.  And 
he  is  not  Americanized  in  any  true  sense  until 
he  leaves  his  quarter  and  begins  to  read  the 
papers,  go  to  the  theatres,  eat  the  food,  talk 
the  talk,  and  think  the  thoughts  of  the  Amer 
ican;  in  a  word,  until  he  becomes  bourgeois. 
And  in  the  majority  of  cases  this  takes  at  least 
one  generation. 

Economic  conditions,  on  the  other  hand, 
favor  this  triumph  of  the  bourgeoisie.  We 
seem  to  be  entering  upon  a  period  when  a  vastly 
greater  number  of  men  and  women  will  have 
reasonable  security  of  moderate  income.  But 
security  of  a  moderate  income,  which  means  a 
guaranteed  mediocrity,  is  the  mainstay,  is  al 
most  the  cause,  of  the  bourgeois  spirit,  just  as 
privilege  was  the  support  of  the  aristocracy. 
And  if  in  the  next  generation  ten  times  as  many 


THE  BOURGEOIS  AMERICAN 

families  can  count  on  a  cost  plus  basis  of  living, 
this  will  but  increase  the  middle  class.  It  will 
make,  to  be  sure,  more  education,  more  refine 
ment,  and  perhaps  more  cerebration  possible; 
but  such  a  circumstance  will  not  radically  affect 
the  character  of  the  typical  American. 

Culturally,  we  already  see  the  results  of  the 
many  influences  which  are  making  the  United 
States  bourgeois  in  warp  and  woof.  Our  traits 
are  not  the  fine  exclusiveness,  the  discrimina 
tion,  the  selfishness  of  an  aristocracy.  Nor  are 
they  the  social  solidarity,  the  intellectual  de 
mocracy,  the  intolerance  of  a  proletariat.  One 
finds  rather  individualism  in  opinion  and  unity 
in  thought.  One  finds  conservatism  in  insti 
tutions  and  radicalism  in  personal  ambitions. 
One  finds  a  solid,  though  dull  morality,  a  dis 
trust  of  ideas,  a  plentiful  lack  of  taste,  an 
abundance  of  the  homely  virtues  of  industry, 
truth  telling,  optimism,  idealism,  and  charity, 
which,  in  an  age  that  suits  such  talents,  make  a 
man  healthy,  wealthy,  and,  in  his  own  genera- 

179 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

tion,  wise.  Such  a  cultural  level,  and  such  a 
national  character  are  becoming  more  and  more 
familiar  in  America. 

There  must  be  some  peak  ahead;  some  top 
of  the  curve  when  the  bourgeois  spirit,  even  in 
the  United  States,  will  have  reached  the  climax 
of  its  power,  and  the  height  of  its  vigor,  and 
will  begin  to  lose  its  sharpness  of  outline,  and 
to  give  way  to  the  spirit  of  the  next  age,  be 
that  what  it  may. 

This  peak  is  perhaps  nearer  than  we  suppose. 
What  will  happen  afterwards  lies  in  darkness, 
but  must  depend  in  some  measure  upon  the 
temper  of  the  bourgeoisie ;  and  as  America  bids 
fair  to  be  the  capital  of  Bourgeoisia,  upon  the 
temper  of  America.  The  question  may  be 
posed  this  way.  Are  we,  who  are  no  longer 
the  middle  class,  since  there  is  no  power  other 
than  spiritual  or  intellectual  above  us,  are  we 
proposing  to  imperialize,  or  to  federalize  the 
world  which  we  dominate? 

Is  the  bourgeois  conception  of  security  for 
1 80 


THE  BOURGEOIS  AMERICAN 

all,  and  superiority  (other  than  economic)  for 
none,  to  be  forced  upon  the  years  ahead?  Is 
our  democracy,  as  Brooks  Adams  thinks,  a 
democracy  of  degradation,  a  level  to  which  all 
must  be  either  lifted,  or  lowered?  Will  we 
hold  back,  as  long  as  our  power  lasts,  the  pro 
letariat,  feeding  them,  clothing  them,  convert 
ing  them,  but  suppressing  them,  so  that  we  may 
be  secure?  Will  we  tyrannize  the  exceptional 
in  art,  in  literature,  in  statesmanship,  in  pure 
thinking,  freezing  it  by  distrust,  or  exploiting 
it  for  sensation  and  reducing  its  fruits  to  vul 
garity?  Will  we  resolve  religion  into  a  social 
emotion  and  poetry  to  rhythmic  prose?  Must 
the  poor  fragments  of  the  privileged  classes 
that  still  remain,  and  the  little  shopkeepers,  and 
the  teachers  with  their  hankerings  after  an  in 
tellectual  aristocracy,  and  the  skilled  workman 
with  the  feverish  zeal  of  a  new  convert  to  secur 
ity  still  upon  him — must  they  all  unite  with  the 
industrial  magnate  in  a  holy  alliance  of  things 
as  they  are  to  crush  into  uniformity  a  humanity 

181 


EVERYDAY  AMERICANS 

where  only  rebels  against  our  authority  and  the 
uncivilized  remain? 

This  would  be  the  imperialism  of  the  bour 
geoisie.  And  neither  our  churches,  which  are 
rigidly  bourgeois,  nor  our  universities,  which 
are  ponderously  bourgeois,  and  both  trading  in 
security,  offer  leadership  that  guarantees 
escape. 

Or  will  we  attempt  to  federalize  this  world 
that  apparently  we  have  conquered,  allowing 
autonomy  for  races  of  ideas,  nations  of  cus 
toms,  and  room  enough  for  plantations  of  new 
desires  in  our  fat  fields  ?  Will  we  tolerate  fine 
ness,  encourage  variety,  permit  heresy,  prepare 
for  change?  It  is  said  by  way  of  compliment 
that  here  in  America  we  have  neither  aristo 
crats  nor  peasants.  Will  we  preserve,  or  de 
stroy,  the  peasant  virtues,  the  ideas  of  the 
aristocrat,  the  desires  of  the  intellectual.  Will 
we  make  possible  a  nation  where  to  be  average 
is  not  the  highest  good  ? 

I  have  no  answer,  naturally.  There  is  no 
182 


THE  BOURGEOIS  AMERICAN 

reply  that  can  now  be  formulated.  But  the  so 
lution  is  already  present  in  the  problem  itself. 
It  is  to  be  found  in  men  and  women,  in  boys 
and  girls  especially,  who  will  belong  to  the  new 
order  and  who  will  answer  in  their  time.  If 
you  wish  to  speculate  upon  what  will  become 
of  the  post-bellum  American,  whose  traits  as 
they  exist  to-day  have  been  the  subject  of  this 
book,  study,  on  the  one  hand,  the  younger 
leaders  in  the  labor  parties,  and  on  the  other, 
the  college  undergraduates.  In  them  lies  the 
future. 


THE   END 


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